Astounding v48n06 (1952 02) (MadMaxAU)

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SCIENCE FICTION

FEBRUARY 1952 VOL. XL VIII, NO. 6

SHORT NOVEL

firewater, by William Torn 7

NOVELETTES

bridge, by James Blish 57

steel brother, by Gordon R. Dickson 103

SHORT STORIES

-E v, by Raymond Z. Galkin and- Jerome Bixby 125

s t a r - l i n e e d, by H . B. Fyje 129

information, by Alan Barclay 141

ARTICLES

birthplace for planets, by Howard L. Myers . . S3
symbolic logic and metamathematics,

by Crispin Kim-Bradley 94

READERS’ DEPARTMENTS

the editor’s page . . 5

the analytical laboratory 124

IN TIMES TO COME 151

THE REFERENCE LIBRARY 152

BRASS TACKS 162

Editor Assistant Editor Adv. Mgr.

JOHN W. CAMPBELL, JR. KAY TARRANT WALTER J. MC BRIDE

COVER BY VAN DONGEN

Illustrations by Orban, Rogers and van Dongen

The editorial contents have not been published before, are protected by copyright and cannot be reprinted
without publishers' permission. All stories in this magazine are fiction. No actual persons are designated by
name or character. Any similarity is coincidental.

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HOW DO YOU THINK?

There are four groups of people in factors. The unique quality of a hu-

our society who are basically inter-
ested in how human beings think: the
psychologist, the politician, the com-
puterman, and the neurosurgeon.

The interest of the psychologist is
obvious, and long recognized. The in-
terest of the politician is even older,
and more firmly entrenched. Both of
these groups — particularly the clinical
psychologist, personnel psychologist
and psychotherapist — are interested
in practical results, which boils down
to what rather than how. The adver-
tising man and the politician, like the
psychotherapist, are seeking to induce
human beings to accept the line of
thinking they choose to arouse, or to
divert the individual from an. unde-
sired line of thought. To them how
thinking is done is of less importance
basically than how to change thinking.

The interest of the computermen is
obvious; to date, the human mind is
the only mechanism known that is
capable of creative thought. Creative
thinking might be defined, for the pur-
pose of discussion, as the ability to get
correct answers from inadequate data;
a computer can give the right answer
if it is supplied with all the necessary

man being is that he can get right
answers when the data is inadequate,
inaccurate, irrelevant, and/or mis-
taken. When the computerman can
make a machine that, given only
seventy per cent of the necessary cor-
rect data, an equal amount of totally
irrelevant data, an additional twenty
per cent of the needed data in a wrong,
misevaluated, or inaccurate manner,
and still come up with an exact and
correct answer — he’ll have a machine
that can think. Human beings can;
it’s called “creative thinking.” The
computermen would most ardently
like to know how in blazes a couple of
pounds of grayish protoplasm turns
the neat little trick. There has been
discussion in the Brass Tacks section
of the nature of “ Phinnaegel’s Con-
stant” under various names; essen-
tially it’s the Quantity which, when
multiplied by, divided into, subtracted
from or added to the wrong answer
yields the right answer. To date, the
only known example of Phinnaegel’s
Constant is an active human mind;
computermen would love to have the
technique of deriving that Quantity,
and build it into their machines. In

HOW DO YOU THINK?

5

essence, they need the gimmick that
will take in data with an average ac-
curacy of plus or minus twenty per
cent and using equipment that is ac-
curate to plus or minus ten per cent,
turn out answers accurate to 0.2%.
Human beings do it every day, and do
it just fine !

The interest of the neurosurgeon,
however, was not clear to me until I
had lunch with a neurosurgical re-
searcher the other day. Basically, the
neurosurgeon’s problem is that of re-
pairing a damaged piece of high-pre-
cision equipment the operating prin-
ciples of which he does not know. The
regular radio repairman, working with
circuit diagram and test meters, has
troubles enough with a ten-tube radio.
With the modern thirty-plus-tube
television set, a higher level of tech-
nician is required. Now let’s hand the
repair technician a piece of equipment
with the comment, “My matter trans-
mitter isn’t working well; will you fix
it please?”

The neurosurgeon is seeking to re-
pair a human brain, damaged in an
accident, by a tumor, disease, or by
some undetermined cause. What does
a brain do? It thinks. Fine — and a
matter transmitter transmits matter.
It would help enormously if the neuro-
surgeon had some idea of how thinking
is done. The more closely he can cor-
relate malfunction as observed by the
individual’s actions and reactions with
structural mechanism, the better he
can do his job.

6

The first step in doing this is, neces-
sarily, finding out what the actual
function of the mind is. True, the
brain controls body motions; the
areas relating to mechanical function
of the body, and to sensory per-
ception areas, have been fairly well
plotted out. But a St. Bernard dog
weighs about as much as a man, has a
body of about equal size and complex-
ity, and gets along nicely on a great
deal less brain — and even it is a highly
intelligent animal, immeasurably ex-
ceeding in intelligence the biggest
computing machine yet built. So
what’s the. major portion of the human
brain there for? What’s its function?

Particularly confusing is the fact
that major portions of the brain can
be destroyed, with no apparent de-
crease in the operating efficiency of the
human being. Pasteur, for example,
lost nearly half his brain by disease in
his youth; all of his great work was
done, quite literally, with a lame
brain.

Until the neurosurgeons know how
men think, it is almost impossible to
develop the knowledge necessary to
carry on their immensely important
work. And it is immeasurably impor-
tant to those human beings who need
their help; most of us would gladly
sacrifice two legs and an arm rather
than a small part of our ability to
think, and have being as “I”. Des-
cartes “Cogito; ergo sum has as its
corollary, “If I do not think, I am
(i Continued on page 160)

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE- PICT IOM

FIREWATER

FIREWATER

BY WILLIAM TENN

The Aliens were destroying
humanity's self-respect; the Primeys
■were giving men wonderful devices,
and acute headaches, and — nobody
had an answer. But sometimes
"Business As Usual ” pays o ff!

Illustrated by van Dongen

The hairiest, dirtiest and oldest
of the three visitors from Arizona
scratched his back against the plastic
of the webfoam chair. “Insinuations
are lavender nearly,” he remarked by
way of opening the conversation.

His two companions — the thin
young man with dripping eyes, and
the woman whose good looks were
marred chiefly by incredibly decayed
teeth — giggled and relaxed. The thin
young man said “Gabble, gabble,
honk!” under his breath, and the
other two nodded emphatically.

Greta Seidenheim looked up from
the tiny stenographic machine resting
on a pair of the most exciting knees
her employer had been able to find in
Greater New York. She swiveled her
blond beauty at him. “That too, Mr.
Hebster?”

The president of Hebster Securities,
Inc., waited until the memory of her
voice ceased to tickle his ears; he had
much clear thinking to do. Then he
nodded and said resonantly, “That
too, Miss Seidenheim. Close phonetic
approximations of the gabble-honk
and remember to indicate when it
sounds like a question and when like
an exclamation.”

He rubbed his recently manicured
fingernails across the desk drawer con-
taining his fully loaded Parabellum.
Check. The communication buttons
with which he could summon any
quantity of Hebster Securities person-
nel up to the nine hundred working! at
present in the Hebster Building lay
some eight inches from the other hand.
Check. And there were the doors here,
the doors there, behind which his uni-
formed bodyguard stood poised to
burst in at a signal which would blaze
before them the moment his right foot
came off the tiny spring set in the
floor. And check.

Algernon Hebster could talk busi-
ness — even with Primeys.

Courteously, he nodded at each one
of his visitors from Arizona ; he smiled
ruefully at what the dirty shapeless
masses they wore on their feet were

g

doing to the calf-deep rug that had
been woven specially for his private
office. He had greeted them when Miss
Seidenheim had escorted them in.
They had laughed in his face.

“Suppose we rattle off some intro-
ductions. You know me. I’m Hebster,
Algernon Hebster — you asked for me
specifically at the desk in the lobby.
If it’s important to the conversation,
my secretary’s name is Greta Seiden-
heim. And you, sir?”

He had addressed the old fellow, but
the thin young man leaned forward in
his seat and held out a taut, almost
transparent hand. “Names?” he in-
quired. “Names are round if not re-
vealed. Consider names. How many
names? Consider names, reconsider
names!”

The woman leaned forward too, and
the smell from her diseased mouth
reached Hebster even across the enor-
mous space of his office. “ Rabble and
reaching and all the upward clash,”
she intoned, spreading her hands as if
in agreement with an obvious point.
“Emptiness derogating itself into in-
finity — ”

“Into duration,” the older man
corrected.

“ Into infinity,” the woman insisted.

“Gabble, gabble, honk?” the young
man queried bitterly.

“Listen!” Hebster roared. “When
I asked for — ”

The communicator buzzed and he
drew a deep breath and pressed a but-

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

ton. His receptionist’s voice boiled out
rapidly, fearfully:

“I remember your orders, Mr. Heb-
ster, but those two men from the UM
Special Investigating Commission are
here again and they look as if they
mean business. I mean they look as if
they’ll make trouble.”

“Yost and Funatti?”

“Yes, sir. From what they said to
each other, I think they know you
have three Primeys in there. They
asked me what are you trying to do — ■
deliberately inflame the Firsters? They
said they’re going to invoke full supra-
national powers and force an entry if
you don’t — ”

“Stall them.”

“But, Mr. Hebster, the UM Special
Investigating — ”

“Stall them, I said. Are you a re-
ceptionist or a swinging door? Use
your imagination, Ruth. You have a
nine-hundred-man organization and a
ten-million-dollar corporation at your
disposal. You can stage any kind of
farce in that outer office you want — up
to and including the deal where some
actor made up to look like me walks
in and drops dead at their feet. Stall
them and I’ll nod a bonus at you.
Stall them." He clicked off, looked up.

His visitors, at least, were having a
fine time. They had turned to face
each other in a reeking triangle of
gibberish. Their voices rose and fell ar-
gumentatively, pleadingly, decisively;
but all Algernon Hebster’s ears could
register of what they said were very

FIREWATER

many sounds similar to gabble and an
occasional, indisputable honk!

His lips curled contempt inward.
Humanity prime! These messes? Then
he lit a cigarette and shrugged. Oh,
well. Humanity prime. And business
is business.

Just remember they’re not supermen,
he told himself. They may be dangerous,
but they’re not supermen. Not by a long
shot. Remember that epidemic of influ-
enza that almost wiped them out, and
how you, diddled those two other Primeys
last month. They’re not supermen, but
they’re not humanity either. They’re just
different.

Fie glanced at his secretary and ap-
proved. Greta Seidenheim clacked
away on her machine as if she were
recording the curtest, the tritest of
business letters. He wondered what
system she was using to catch the in-
tonations. Trust Greta, though, she’d
do it.

“Gabble, honk! Gabble, gabble,
gabble, honk, honk. Gabble, honk,
gabble, gabble, honk? Honk.” j|

What had precipitated all this con-
versation? He’d only asked for their
names. Didn’t they use names in
Arizona? Surely, they knew that it was
customary here. They claimed to know
at least as much as he about such
matters.

Maybe it was something else that
had brought them to New York this
time — maybe something about the
Aliens? He felt the short hairs rise on
the back of his neck and he smoothed

9

them down self-consciously.

Trouble was it was so easy to learn
their language. It was such a very
simple matter to be able to understand
them in these talkative moments. Al-
most as easy as falling off a log: — or
jumping off a cliff.

Well, his time was limited. He
didn’t know how long Ruth could hold
the UM investigators in his outer
office. Somehow he had to get a grip
on the meeting again without offend-
ing them in any of the innumerable,
highly dangerous ways in which Pri-
meys could be offended.

He rapped the desk top— gently.
Tile gabble-honk stopped short at the
hyphen. The woman rose slowly.

“On this question of names,” Heb-
ster began doggedly, keeping his eyes
on the woman, “since you people
claim — ”

The woman writhed agonizingly for
a moment and sat down on the floor.
She smiled at. Hebster. With her rotted
teeth, the 1 smile had all the brilliance
of a dead star.

Hebster cleared his throat and pre-
pared to try again.

“If you want names,” the older man
said suddenly, “you can call me
Larry.”

The president of Hebster Securities
shook himself and managed to say
“Thanks” in a somewhat weak but
not too surprised voice. He looked at
the thin young man.

“You can call me Theseus.” The

young man looked sad as he said it.

“Theseus? Fine!” One thing about
Primeys when you started clicking
with them, you really moved along.
But Theseus! Wasn’t that just like a
Primey? Now the woman, and they
could begin.

They were all looking a t the woman,
even Greta with a curiosity which had
sneaked up past her beauty-parlor
glaze.

“Name,” the woman whispered to
herself. “Name a name.”

Oh, no, Hebster groaned. Let’s not
stall here.

Larry evidently had decided that
enough time had been wasted. He
made a suggestion to the woman.
“Why not call yourself Moe?”

The young man — Theseus, it was
now — also seemed to get interested in
the problem. “Rover’s a good name,”
he announced helpfully.

“How about Gloria?” Hebster asked
desperately.

The woman considered. “Moe*
Rover, 6 Gloria,” she mused. “Larry,.
Theseus, Seidenheim, Hebster, me.”
She seemed to be running a total.

Anything might come out, Hebster
knew. But at least they were not act-
ing snobbish any more: they were
talking down on his level now. Not
only no gabble-honk, but none of this
sneering double-talk which was almost
worse. At least they were making
sense — of a sort.

“For the purposes of this discus-
sion,” the woman said at last, “my

name will be . . . will be — My name
is S.S. Lusitania.”

“Fine!” Hebster roared, letting the
word he’d kept bubbling on his lips
burst out. “ That’s a pie name. Larry,
Theseus and . . . er, S.S. Lusitania.
Fine bunch of people. Sound. Let’s get
down to business. You came here on
business, I take it?”

“Right,” Larry said. “We heard
about you from two others who left
home a month ago to come to New
York. They talked about you when
they got back to Arizona.”

“ They did, eh? I hoped they would .”
Theseus slid off his chair and
squatted next to the woman who was
making plucking motions at the air.
“They talked about you,” he re-
peated. “ They said you treated them
very well, that you showed them as
much respect as a thing like you could
generate. They also said you cheated
them.”

“Oh, well, Theseus,” Hebster spread
his manicured hands. “I’m a business-
man.”

“You’re a businessman,” S.S. Lusi-
tania agreed, getting to her feet
stealthily and taking a great swipe
with both hands at something in-
visible in front of her face. “And here,
in this spot, at this moment, so are we.
You can have what we’ve brought, but
you’ll pay for it. And don’t think you
can cheat us.”

Her hands, cupped over each other,
came down to her waist. She pulled
them apart suddenly and a tiny eagle

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

FIREWATER

fluttered out. It flapped toward the
fluorescent panels glowing in the ceil-
ing. Its flight was hampered by the
heavy, striped shield upon its breast,
by the bunch of arrows it held in one
claw, by the olive branch it grasped
with the other. It turned its miniature
bald head and gasped at Algernon
Hebster, then began to drift rapidly
down to the rug. Just before it hit the
floor, it disappeared.

Hebster shut his eyes, remembering
the strip of bunting that had fallen
from the eagle’s beak when it had
turned to gasp. There had been words
printed on the bunting, words too
small to see at the distance, but he
was sure the words would have read
“E Pluribus Unum.” He was as cer-
tain of that as he was of the necessity
of acting unconcerned over the whole
incident, as unconcerned as the Pri-
meys. Professor Kleimbocher said Pri-
meys were mental drunkards. But why
did they give everyone else the D.T.’s?

He opened his eyes. “Well,” he said,
“what have you to sell?”

Silence for a moment. Theseus
seemed to forget the point he was try-
ing to make; S.S. Lusitania stared at
Larry.

Larry scratched his right side
through heavy, stinking cloth.

“Oh, an infallible method for de-
feating anyone who attempts to apply
the reductio ad absurdum to a reason-
able proposition you advance.” He
yawned smugly and began scratching

10

11

his left side.

Hebster grinned because he was feel-
ing so good. “No. Can’t use it.”

“Can’t use it?” The old man was
trying hard to look amazed. He shook
his head. He stole a sideways glance
at S.S. Lusitania.

She smiled again and wriggled to the
floor. “Larry still isn’t talking a lan-
guage you can understand, Mr. Heb-
ster,” she cooed, very much like a
fertilizer factory being friendly. “We
came here with something we know
you need badly. Very badly.”

“Yes?” They’re like those two Pri-
mey s last month, Hebster exulted: they
don’t know what’s good and what isn’t.
Wonder if their masters would know.
Well, and if they did — who does business
with Aliens?

“We . . . have,” she spaced the
words carefully, trying pathetically
for a dramatic effect, “a new shade of
red, but not merely that. Oh, no! A
new shade of red, and a full set of color
values derived from it! A complete set
of color values derived from this one
shade of red, Mr. Hebster I Think what
a non-objectivist painter can do with
such a — ”

“Don’t sell me, lady. Theseus, do
you want to have a go now?”

Theseus had been frowning at the
green foundation of the desk. He
leaned back, looking satisfied. Hebster
realized abruptly that the tension
under his right foot had disappeared.
Somehow, Theseus had become cogni-
zant of the signal-spring set in the floor ;

12

and, somehow, he had removed it.

He had disintegrated it without set-
ting off the alarm to which it was
wired.

Giggles from three Primey throats
and a rapid exchange of “gabble-
honk.” Then they all knew what
Theseus had done and how Hebster
had tried to protect himself. They
weren’t angry, though — and they
didn’t sound triumphant. Try to un-
derstand Primey behavior !

No need to get unduly alarmed —
the price of dealing with these charac-
ters ..was a nervous stomach. The re-
wards, on the other hand —

Abruptly, they were businesslike
again.

Theseus snapped out his suggestion
with all the finality of a bazaar mer-
chant making his last, absolutely the
last offer. “A set of population indices
which can be correlated with — ”

“No, Theseus,” Hebster told him
gently.

Then, while Hebster sat back and
enjoyed, temporarily forgetting the
missing coil under his foot, they
poured out more, desperately, fever-
ishly, weaving in and out of each
other’s sentences.

“A portable neutron stabilizer for
high altit — ”

“More than fifty ways of saying
‘however’ without — ”

“ ... So that every housewife can
do an entrechat while cook — ”

“. . . Synthetic fabric with the
drape of silk and manufactura — ”

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

“. . . Decorative pattern for bald
heads using the follicles as — ”

“. . . Complete and utter refuta-
tion of all pyramidologists from — ”
“All right!” Hebster roared, “All
right! That’s enough!”

Greta Seidenheim almost forgot her-
self and sighed with relief. Her steno-
graphic machine had been sounding
like a centrifuge.

“Now,” said. the executive. “What
do you want in exchange?”

“ One of those we said is the one you
want, eh?” Larry muttered. “Which
one — the pyramidology refutation?
That’s it, I betcha.”

S.S. Lusitania waved her hands con-
temptuously. “Bishop’s miters, you
fool ! The new red color values excited
him. The new — ”

Ruth’s voice came over the com-
municator. “Mr. Hebster, Yost and
Funatti are back. I stalled them, but
I just received word from the lobby
receptionist that they’re back and on
their way upstairs. You have two
minutes, maybe three. And they’re so
mad they almost look like Firsters
themselves ! ”

“Thanks. When they climb out of
the elevator, do what you can without
getting too illegal.” He turned to his
guests. “Listen — ”

They had gone off again.

“ Gabble, gabble, honk, honk, honk?
Gabble, honk, gabble, gabble! Gabble,
honk, gabble, honk, gabble, honk,
honk.” 1

FIREWATER

Could they honestly make sense out
of. these throat-clearings and half-
sneezes? Was it really a language as
superior to all previous languages of
man as ... as the Aliens were sup-
posed to be to man himself? Well, at
least they could communicate with the
Aliens by means of it. And the Aliens,
the Aliens —

He recollected abruptly the two
angry representatives of the world
state who were hurtling towards his
office.

“Listen, friends. You came here to
sell. You’ve shown me your stock, and
I’ve seen something I’d like to buy.
What exactly is immaterial. The only
question now is what you want for it.
And let’s make it fast. I have some
other business to transact.”

The woman with the dental night-
mare stamped her foot. A cloud no
larger than ^ man’s hand formed near
the ceiling, burst and deposited a pail-
ful of water on Llebster’s fine custom-
made rug.

He ran a manicured forefinger
around the inside of his collar so that
his bulging neck veins would not burst.
Not right now, anyway. He looked at
Greta and regained confidence from
the serenity with which she waited for
more conversation to transcribe. There ■
was a model of business precision for
you. The Primeys might pull what orfe
of them had in London two years ago,
before they were barred from all metro-
politan areas — increased a housefly’s
size to that of an elephant — and Greta

13

Seidenheim would go on separating
fragments of conversation into the
appropriate shorthand symbols.

With all their power, why didn’t
they take what they wanted? Why
trudge wearisome miles to cities and
attempt to smuggle themselves into
illegal audiences with operators like
Hebster, when most of them were
caught easily and sent back to the
reservation and those that weren’t
were cheated unmercifully by the
“straight” humans they encountered?
Why didn’t they just blast their way
in, take their weird and pathetic prizes
and toddle back to their masters? For
that matter, why didn’t their masters —
But Primey psych was Primey psych
— not for this world, nor of it.

“We’ll tell you what we want in
exchange,” Larry began in the middle
of a honk. He held up a hand on which
the length of the fingernails was indi-
cated graphically by the grime beneath
them and began to tot up the items,
bending a digit for each item. “First,
a hundred paper-bound copies of Mel-
ville’s ‘Mob}'' Dick’. Then, twenty-five
crystal radio sets, with earphones; two
earphones for each set. Then, two
Empire State Buildings or three Radio
Cities, whichever is more convenient.
We want those with foundations in-
tact. A reasonably good copy of the
‘Hermes ’ statue by Praxiteles. And an
electric toaster, circa- 1941. That’s
about all, isn’t it, Theseus?”

Theseus bent over until his nose
rested against his knees.

14

Hebster groaned. The list wasn’t as
bad as he’d expected — remarkable the
way their masters always yearned for
the electric gadgets and artistic achieve-
ments of Earth — but he had so little
time to bargain with them. Two Em-
pire State Buildings!

“Mr. Hebster,” his receptionist
chattered over the communicator.
“ Those SIC men — I managed to get a
crowd out in the corridor to push to-
ward their elevator when it came to
this floor, and I’ve locked the ... I
mean I’m trying to ... but I don’t
think — Can you — ”

“Good girl! You’re doing fine!”

“Is that all we want, Theseus?”
Larry asked again. “Gabble?”

Hebster heard a crash in the outer
office and footsteps running across the
floor.

“See here, Mr. Hebster,” Theseus
said at last, “ if you don’t want to buy
Larry’s reduc-tio ad absurdum exploder,
and you don’t like my method of deco-
rating bald heads for all its innate
artistry, how about a system of mu-
sical notation — ■”

Somebody tried Hebster’s door,
found it locked. There was a knock on
the door, repeated most immediately
with more urgency.

“He’s already found something he
wants,” S.S. Lusitania snapped. “Yes,
Larry, that was the complete list.”
Hebster plucked a handful of hair
from his already receding forehead.
“Good! Now, look, I can give you
everything but the two Empire State

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

Buildings and the three Radio Cities.”
“Or the three Radio Cities,” Larry
corrected. “ Don’t try to cheat us ! Two
Empire State Buildings or three Radio
Cities. Whichever is more convenient.
Why . . . isn’t it worth that to you?”
“Open this door!” a bull-mad voice
yelled. “Open this door in the name
of United Mankind!”

“Miss Seidenheim, open the door,”
Hebster said loudly and winked at his
secretary who rose, stretched and be-
gan a thoughtful, slow-motion study
in the direction of the locked panel.
There was a crash as of a pair of
shoulders being thrown against it.
Hebster knew that his office door could
withstand a medium-sized tank. But
there was a limit even to delay when
it came to fooling around with the UM
Special Investigating Commission.

FIREWATER

Those boys knew their Primeys and
their Primey-dealers; they were em-
powered to shoot first and ask ques-
tions afterwards — as the questions
occurred to them.

“It’s not a matter of whether it’s
worth my while,” Hebster told them
rapidly as he shepherded them to the
exit behind his desk. “For reasons I’m
sure you aren’t interested in, I just
can’t give away two Empire State
Buildings and/or three Radio Cities
with foundations intact — not. at the
moment. I’ll give you the rest of it,
and — ”

“ Open this door or we start blasting
it down!”

“Please, gentlemen, please,” Greta
Seidenheim told them sweetly. '‘You’ll
kill a poor working girl who’s trying
awfully hard to let you in. The lock’s

IS

f

stuck.” She fiddled with the doorknob,
watching Hebster with a trace of
anxiety in her fine eyes.

“And to replace those items,” Heb-
ster was going on. “I will — ”

“What I mean,” Theseus broke in,
“is this. You know the greatest single
difficulty composers face in the twelve-
tone technique?”

“I can offer you,” the executive
continued doggedly, sweat bursting
out of his skin like spring freshets,
“complete architectural blueprints of
the Empire State Building and Radio
City, plus five . . . no, I’ll make it
ten . . . scale models of each. And
you get the rest of the stuff you asked
for. That’s it. Take it or leave it.
Fast!”

They glanced at each other, as
Hebster threw the exit door open and
gestured to the five liveried body-
guards waiting near his private ele-
tor. “Done,” they said in unison.

“Good!” Hebster almost squeaked.
He pushed them through the doorway
and said to the tallest of the five men :
“Nineteenth floor!”

He slammed the exit shut just as
Miss Seidenheim opened the outer
office door. Yost and Funatti, in the
bottle-green police uniform of the UM,
charged through. Without pausing,
they ran to where Hebster stood and
plucked the exit open. They could all
hear the elevator descending.

Funatti, a little, olive-skinned man,
sniffed. “Primeys,” he muttered. “He

16

had Primeys here, all right. Smell that
unwash, Yost?”

“Yeah,” said the bigger man. “Come
on. The emergency stairway. We can
track that elevator!”

They bolstered their service weapons
and clattered down the metal-tipped
stairs. Below, the elevator stopped.

Hebster’s secretary was at the com-
municator. “Maintenance !” She waited.
“Maintenance, automatic locks on the
nineteenth floor exit until the party
Mr. Hebster just sent down gets to a
lab somewhere else. And keep apolo-
gizing to those cops until then. Re-
member, they’re SIC.”

“Thanks, Greta,” Hebster said,
switching to the personal now that
they were alone. He plumped into his
desk chair and blew out gustily:
“There must be easier ways of making
a million.”

She raised two perfect blond eye-
brows. “ Or of being an absolute mon-
arch right inside the parliament of
man?”

“If they wait long enough,” he told
her lazily, “I’ll be the UM, modern
global government and all. Another
year or two might do it.”

“Aren’t you forgetting one Vander-
meer Dempsey? His huskies also want
to replace the UM. Not to mention
their colorful plans for you. And there
are an awful, awful lot of them.” ,

“They don’t worry me, Greta. Hu-
manity First will dissolve overnight
once that decrepit old demagogue
gives up the ghost.” He stabbed at the

ASTOUNDING SCI HN < ' K -FICTION

communicator button. “ Maintenance !
Maintenance, that party I sent down
arrived at a safe lab yet?”

“No, Mr. Hebster. But everything’s
going all right. We sent them up to
the twenty-fourth floor and got the
SIC men rerouted downstairs to the
personnel levels. Uh, Mr. Hebster —
about the SIC. We take your orders
and all that, but none of us wants to
get in trouble with the Special In-
vestigating Commission. According to
the latest laws, it’s practically a capital
offense to obstruct ’em.”

“Don’t worry,” Hebster told him.
“I’ve never let one of my employees
down yet. The boss fixes everything is
the motto here. Call me when you’ve
got those Primeys safely hidden and
ready for questioning.”

He turned back to Greta. “ Get that
stuff typed before you leave and into
Professor Kleimbocher’s hands. He
thinks he may have a new angle on
their gabble-honk.”

She nodded. “I wish you could use
recording apparatus instead of making
me sit over an old-fashioned click-box.”
“So do I. But Primeys enjoy reach-
ing out and putting a hex on electrical
apparatus — when they aren't collect-
ing it for the Aliens. I had a raft of
wire and tape recorders busted in the
middle of Primey interviews before I
decided that human stenos were the
only answer. And a Primey may get
around to bollixing them some day.”
“Cheerful thought. I must remem-
ber to dream about the possibility

FIREWATER

some cold night. Well, I should com-
plain,” she muttered as she went into
her own little office, “Primey hexes
built this business and pay my salary
as well as supply me with the sparkling
little knicknacks I love so well.”

That was not quite true, Hebster
remembered as he sat waiting for the
communicator to buzz the news of his
recent guests’ arrival in a safe lab.
Something like ninety-five per cent of
Hebster Securities had been built out
of Primey gadgetry extracted from
them in various fancy deals, but the
base of it all had been the small in-
vestment bank he had inherited from
his father, back in the days of the
Half-War — the days when the Aliens
had first appeared on Earth.

The fearfully intelligent dots swirl-
ing in their variously shaped multi-
colored bottles were completely out-
side the pale of human understanding.
There had been no way at all to com-
municate with them for a time.

A humorist had remarked back in
those early days that the Aliens came
not to bury man, not to conquer or en-
slave him. They had a truly dreadful
mission— to ignore him !

No one knew, even today, what part
of the galaxy the Aliens came from. Or
why. No one knew what the total of
their small visiting population came
to. Or how they operated their wide-
open and completely silent spaceships.
The few things that had been discov-
ered about them on the occasions when

. 17

they deigned to swoop down and ex-
amine some human enterprise, with
the aloof amusement of the highly
civilized tourist, had served to confirm
a technological superiority over Man
that strained and tore the capacity of
his richest imagination. A sociological
treatise Hebster had read recently sug-
gested that they operated from con-
cepts as far in advance of modern
science as a meteorologist sowing a
drought-struck area with dry ice was
beyond the primitive agriculturist
blowing a ram’s horn at the heavens
in a frantic attempt to wake the slum-
bering gods of rain.

Prolonged, infinitely dangerous ob-
servation had revealed, for example,
that the dots-in-bottles seemed to
have developed past the need for pre-
pared tools of any sort. They worked
directly on the material itself, shaping
it to need, evidently creating and
destroying matter at will !

Some humans had communicated
with them —

They didn’t stay human.

Men with superb brains had looked
into the whirring, flickering settle-
ments established by the outsiders. A
few had returned with tales of wonders
the)' had realized dimly and not quite
seen. Their descriptions always sounded
as if their eyes had been turned off at
the most crucial moments or a mental
fuse had blown just this side of
understanding.

Others — such celebrities as a Presi-
dent of Earth, a three-time winner of

the Nobel Prize, famous poets — had
evidently broken through the fence
somehow. These, however, were the
ones who didn’t return. They stayed
in the Alien settlements in the Gobi,
the Sahara, the American Southwest.
Barely able to fend for themselves,
despite newly-acquired and almost un-
believable powers, they shambled
worshipfully around the outsiders
speaking, with weird writhings of
larynx and nasal passage, what was
evidently a human approximation of
their masters’ language — a kind of
pidgin Alien. Talking, with a Primey,
someone had said, was like a blind man
trying to read a page of Braille orig-
inally written for an octopus.

And that these bearded, bug-ridden,
stinking derelicts, these chattering
wrecks drunk and sodden on the logic
of an entirely different life-form, were
the heavy yellow cream of the human
race didn’t help people’s egos any.

Humans and Primeys despised each
other almost from the first; humans
for Primey subservience and helpless-
ness in human terms, Primeys for
human ignorance and ineptness in.
Alien terms. And, except when operat-
ing under Alien orders and through
barely legal operators like Hebster,
Primeys didn’t communicate with hu-
mans any more than their masters did .

When institutionalized, they either
gabble-honked themselves into an
early grave or, losing patience sud-
denly, they might dissolve a path to
freedom right through the walls of the

18

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

asylum and any attendants who
chanced to be in the way. Therefore
the enthusiasm of sheriff and deputy,
nurse and orderly, had waned consid-
erably and the forcible incarceration
of Primeys had almost ceased.

Since the two groups were so far
apart psychologically as to make
mating between them impossible, the
ragged miracle-workers had been hon-
ored with the status of a separate
classification :

Humanity Prime. Not better than
humanity, not necessarily worse — but
different, and dangerous.

What made them that way ? Hebster
rolled his chair back and examined the
hole in the floor from which the alarm
spring had spiraled. Theseus had dis-
integrated it — how? With a thought?
Telekinesis, say, applied to all the
molecules of the metal simultaneously,
making them move rapidly and at
random. Or possibly he had merely
moved the spring somewhere else.
Where? In space? In hyperspace? In
time? Hebster shook his head and
pulled himself back to the efficiently
smooth and sanely useful desk surface.

“Mr. Hebster?” the communicator
inquired abruptly, and he jumped a
bit, “ this is Margritt of General Lab
23B. Your Primeys just arrived. Reg-
ular check?”

Regular check meant drawing them
out on every conceivable technical
subject by the nine specialists in the
general laboratory. This involved fir-

ing questions at them with the rapidity
of a police interrogation, getting them
off balance and keeping them there in
the hope that a useful and unexpected
bit of scientific knowledge would drop.

“Yes,” Hebster told him. “Regular
check. But first let a textile man have
a whack at them. In fact let him take
charge of the check.”

A pause. “The only textile man in
this section is Charlie Verus.”

“Well?” Hebster asked in mild ir-
ritation, “Why put it like that? He’s
competent I hope. What does person-
nel say about him?”

“Personnel says he’s competent.”
“Then there you are. Look, Mar-
gritt, I have the SIC running around
my building with blood in its enormous
eye. I don’t have time to muse over
your departmental feuds. Put Verus
on. ”

“Yes, Mr. Hebster. Hey Bert! Get
Charlie Verus. Him.”

Hebster shook his head and chuckled.
These technicians ! Verus was probably
brilliant and nasty.

The box crackled again: “Mr. Heb-
ster? Mr. Verus.” The voice expressed
boredom to the point of obvious affec-
tation. But the . man was probably
good despite his neuroses. Hebster
Securities, Inc., had a first-rate per-
sonnel department.

“ Verus? Those Primeys, I want you
to take charge of the check. One of
them knows how to make a synthetic
fabric with the drape of silk. Get that
first and then go after anything else

FIREWATER

19

they have.”

“Primeys, Mr. Hebster?”

“I said Primeys, Mr. Verus. You
are a textile technician, please to re-
member, and not the straight or ping-
pong half of a comedy routine. Get
humping. I want a report on that
synthetic fabric by tomorrow. Work
all night if you have to.”

“Before we do, Mr. Hebster, you
might be interested in a small piece of
information. There is already in exist-
ence a synthetic which falls better than
silk—”

“I know,” his employer told him
shortly. “ Cellulose acetate. Unfor-
tunately, it has a few disadvantages:
low melting-point, tends to crack;
separate and somewhat inferior dye-
stuffs have to be used for it; poor
chemical resistance. Am I right?”
There was no immediate answer,
but Hebster could feel the dazed nod.
He went on. “Now, we also have
protein fibers. They dye well and fall
well, have the thermoconductivity
control necessary for wearing apparel,
but don’t have the tensile strength of
synthetic fabrics. An artificial protein
fiber might be the answer: it would
drape as well as silk, might be we could
use the acid dyestuffs we use on silk
which result in shades that dazzle
female customers and cause them to
1 fling wide their pocketbooks. There
are a lot of ifs in that, I know, but one
of those Primeys said something about
a synthetic with the drape of silk, and
I don’t think he’d be sane enough to

20

be referring to cellulose acetate. Nor
nylon, orlon, vinyl chloride, or any-
thing else we already have and use.”

“You’ve looked into textile prob-
lems, Mr. Hebster.”

“I have. I’ve looked into everything
to which there are big gobs of money
attached. And now suppose you go
look into those Primeys. Several mil-
lion women are waiting breathlessly
for the secrets concealed in their
beards. Do you think, Verus, that with
the personal and scientific background
I’ve just given you it’s possible you
might now get around to doing the
job you are paid to do?”

“Um-m-m. Yes.”

Hebster walked to the office closet
and got his hat and coat. He liked
working under pressure; he liked to see
people jump up straight whenever he
barked. And now, he liked the prospect
of relaxing.

He, grimaced at the webfoam chair
that Larry had used. No point in
having it resquirted. Have a new one
made.

“I’ll be at the University,” he told
Ruth on his way out. “You can reach
me through Professor Kleimbocher.
But don’t, unless it’s very important.
He gets unpleasantly annoyed when
he’s interrupted.”

She nodded. Then, very hesitantly:
“ Those two men — Yost and Funatti —
from the Special Investigating Com-
mission? They said no one would be
allowed to leave the building.”

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

“Did they now?” he chuckled. “I
think they were angry. They’ve been
that way before. But unless and until
they can hang something on me — And
Ruth, tell my bodyguard to go home,
except for the man with the Primeys.
He’s to check with me, wherever I am,
every two hours.”

tie ambled out, being careful to
smile benevolently at every third
executive and fifth typist in the large
office. A private elevator and entrance
was all very well for an occasional
crisis, but Hebster liked to taste his
successes in as much public as possible.

It would be good to see Kleimbocher
again. He had a good deal of faith in
the linguistic approach; grants from
his corporation had tripled the size
of the university’s philology depart-
ment. After all, the basic problem be-
tween man and Primey as well as man
and Alien was one of communication.
Any attempt to learn their science, to
adjust their mental processes and
logic into safer human channels, would
have to be preceded by understanding.

It was up to Kleimbocher to find
that understanding, not him. “I’m
Hebster,” he thought. “I employ the
people who solve problems. And then
I make money off them.”

Somebody got in front of him.
Somebody else took his arm. “I’m
Hebster,” he repeated automatically,
but out loud. “Algernon Hebster.”
“Exactly the Hebster we want,”
Funatti said holding tightly on to his
arm. “You don’t mind coming along

FIREWATER

with us?”

“Is this an arrest?” Hebster asked
the larger Yost who now moved aside
to let him pass. Yost was touching his
holstered weapon with dancing finger-
tips.

The SIC man shrugged. “Why ask
such questions?” he countered. “Just
come along and be sociable, kind of.
People want to talk to you.”

He allowed' himself to be dragged
through the lobby ornate with murals
by radical painters and nodded appre-
ciation at the doorman who, staring
right through his captors, said enthu-
siastically, “ Good afternoon , Mr. Heb-
ster.” He made himself fairly com-
fortable on the back seat of the dark-
green SIC car, a late model Hebster
Monowheel.

“Surprised to see you minus your
bodyguard.” Yost, who was driving,
remarked over his shoulder.

“ Oh, I gave them the day off.”

“As soon as you were through with
the Primeys? No,” Funatti admitted,
“we never did find out where you
cached them. That’s one big building
you own, mister. And the UM Special
Investigating Commission is notori-
ously understaffed.”

“Not forgetting it’s also notoriously
underpaid,” Yost broke in.

“I couldn’t forget that if I tried,”
Funatti assured him. “ You know, Mr.
Hebster, I wouldn’t have sent my
bodyguard off if I’d been in your shoes.
Right now there’s something about
five times as dangerous as Primeys

21

after you. I mean Humanity Firsters.”
“Vandermeer Dempsey’s crackpots?
Thanks, but I think I’ll survive.”
“That’s all right. Just don’t give
any long odds on the proposition.
Those people have been expanding fast
and furious. The Evening Humani-
tarian alone has a tremendous circula-
tion. And when you figure their weekly
newspapers, their penny booklets and
throwaway handbills, it adds up to an
impressive amount of propaganda.
Day after day they bang away edi-
torially at the people who’re making
money off the Aliens and Primeys. Of
course, they’re really hitting at the
UM, like always, but if an ordinary
Firster met you on the street, he’d be
as likely to cut your heart out as not.
Not interested? Sorry. Well, maybe
you’ll like this. The Evening Humani-
tarian has a cute name for you.”

Yost guffawed. “Tell him,Funatti.”
The corporation president looked at
the little man inquiringly.

“They call you,” Funatti said with
great savoring deliberation, “they call
you an interplanetary pimp!”

Emerging at last from the crosstown
underpass, they sped up the very
latest addition to the strangling city’s
facilities — the East Side Air-Floating
Super-Duper Highway, known famil-
iarly as Dive-Bomber Drive. At the
Forty-Second Street offway, the busi-
est road exit in Manhattan, Yost
failed to make a traffic signal. He
cursed absent-mindedly and Hebster

found himself nodding the involuntary
passenger’s agreement. They watched
the elevator section dwindling down-
ward as the cars that were to mount
the highway spiraled up from the
right. Between the two, there rose and
fell the steady platforms of harbor
traffic while, stacked like so many
decks of cards, the pedestrian stages
awaited their turn below.

“Look! Up there, straight ahead!
See it?”

Hebster and Funatti followed Yost’s
long, waggling forefinger with their
eyes. Two hundred feet north of the
offway and almost a quarter of a mile
straight up, a brown object hung in
obvious fascination. Every once in a
while a brilliant blue dot would enliven
the heavy murk imprisoned in its bell-
jar shape only to twirl around the side
and be replaced by another.

“Eyes? You think they’re eyes?”
Funatti asked, rubbing his small dark
fists against each other futilely. “I
know what the scientists say — that
every dot is equivalent to one person
and the whole bottle is like a family or
a city, maybe. But how do they know?
It’s a theory, a guess. I say they’re
eyes.”

Yost hunched his great body half
out of the open window and shaded his
vision with his uniform cap against the
sun. “Look at it,” they heard him say,
over his shoulder. A nasal twang, long-
buried, came back into his voice as
heaving emotion shook out its culti-
vated accents. “A-setting up there, a-

ASTOUNDtNG SCIENCE-FICTION

staring and a-staring. So all-fired in-
terested in how we get on and off a
busy highway ! Won’t pay us no never
mind when we try to talk to it, when
we try to find out what it wants, where
it comes from, who it is. Oh, no! It’s
too superior to talk to the likes of us!
But it can watch us, hours on end,
days without end, light and dark,
winter and summer; it can watch us
going about our .business; and every
time we dumb two-legged animals try
to do something we find complicated,
along comes a blasted ‘dots-in-bottle’
to watch and sneer and — ”

“Hey there, man,” Funatti leaned
forward and tugged at his partner’s
green jerkin. “Easy! We’re $IC, on
business.”

“All the same,” Yost grunted wist-
fully, as he plopped back into his seat
and pressed the power button, “ I wish
I had Daddy’s little old M-l Garand
right now.” They bowled forward,
smoothed into the next long elevator
section and started to descend. “It
would be worth the risk of getting
pinged."

And this was a UM man, Hebster
reflected with acute discomfort. Not
only UM, at that, but member of a
special group carefully screened for
their lack of anti-Primey prejudice,
sworn to enforce the reservation laws
without discrimination and dedicated
to the proposition that Man could
somehow achieve equality with Alien.

Well, how much dirt-eating could
people do? People without a business

FIREWATER

sense, that is. His father had hauled
himself out of the pick-and-shovel
brigade hand over hand and raised his
only son to maneuver always for
greater control, to search always for
that extra percentage of profit.

But others seemed to have no such
abiding interest, Algernon Hebster
knew regretfully.

They found it impossible to live
with achievements so abruptly made
inconsequential by the Aliens. To
know with certainty that the most
brilliant strokes of which they were
capable, the most intricate designs and
clever careful workmanship, could be
duplicated — and surpassed — in an in-
stant’s creation by the outsiders and
was of interest to them only as a col-
lector’s item. The feeling of inferiority
is horrible enough when imagined; but
when it isn’t feeling but knowledge ,
when it is inescapable and thoroughly
demonstrable, covering every aspect
of constructive activity, it becomes
unbearable and maddening.

No wonder men went berserk under
hours of unwinking Alien scrutiny-
watching them as they marched in a
colorfully uniformed lodge parade, or
fished through a hole in the ice, as they
painfully maneuvered a giant trans-
continental jet to a noiseless landing
or sat in sweating, serried rows chant-
ing to a single, sweating man to
“knock it out of the park and sew the
whole thing up!” No wonder they
seized rusty shotgun or gleaming rifle
and sped shot after vindictive shot

22

23

into a sky poisoned by the contemp-
tuous curiosity of a brown, yellow or
Vermillion “bottle.”

Not that it made very much differ-
ence. It did give a certain release to
nerves backed into horrible psychic
corners. But the Aliens didn’t notice,
and that was most important. The
Aliens went right on watching, as if
all this shooting and uproar, all these
imprecations and weapon-wavings,
were all part of the self-same absorbing
show they had paid to witness and
were determined to see through if for
nothing else than the occasional amus-
ing fluff some member of the inexperi-
enced cast might commit.

The Aliens weren’t injured, and the
Aliens didn’t feel attacked. Bullets,
shells, buckshot, arrows, pebbles from
a slingshot— all Man’s miscellany of
anger passed through them like the
patient and eternal rain coming in the
opposite direction. Yet the Aliens had
solidity somewhere in their strange
bodies. One could judge that by the
way they intercepted light and heat.
And also —

Also by the occasional ping.

Every once in a while, someone
would evidently have hurt an Alien
slightly. Or more probably just an-
noyed it by some unknown concomi-
tant of rifle-firing or javelin-throwing.

There would be the barest suspicion
of a sound — as if a guitarist, had lunged
at a string with his fingertip and de-
cided against it one motor impulse too

24 ’ .

late. And, after this delicate and
hardly-heard ping , quite unspectacu-
larly, the rifleman would be weaponless.
He would be standing there sighting
stupidly up along his empty curled
fingers, elbow cocked out and shoulder
hunched in, like a large oafish child
who had forgotten when to end the
game. Neither his rifle nor a fragment
of it would ever be found. And —
gravely, curiously, intently — the Alien
would go on watching.

The ping seemed to be aimed chiefly
at weapons. Thus, occasionally, a 155
mm. howitzer was pinged, and, also
occasionally, unexpectedly, it might
be a muscular arm, curving back with
another stone, that would disappear to
the accompaniment of a tiny elfin
note. And yet sometimes — could it be
that the Alien, losing interest, had
become careless in its irritation? — the
entire man, murderously violent and
shrieking, would ping and be no more.

It was not as if a counter-weapon
were being used, but a thoroughly
higher order of reply, such as a slap to
an insect bite. Hebster, shivering, re-
called the time • he had seen a black
tubular Alien swirl its amber dots over
a new substreet excavation, seemingly
entranced by the spectacle of men
scrabbling at the earth beneath them.

A red-headed Sequoia of Irish labor
had looked up from Manhattan’s stub-
born granite just long enough to shake
the sweat from his eyelids. So doing,
he had caught sight of the dpt-pulsing
observer and paused to snarl and lift

astounding science -fiction

his pneumatic drill, rattling it in noisy,
if functionless, bravado at the sky. He
had hardly been noticed by his mates,
when the long, dark, speckled repre-
sentative of a race beyond the stars
turned end over end once and pinged.

The heavy drill remained upright
for a moment, then dropped as if it
had abruptly realized its master was
gone. Gone? Almost, he had never
been. So thorough had his disappear-
ance been, so rapid, with so little
flicker had he been snuffed out — harm-
ing and taking with him nothing else
• — that it had amounted to an act of
gigantic and positive noncreation.

No, Hebster decided, making threat-
ening gestures at the Aliens was
suicidal. Worse, like everything else
that had been tried to date, it was
useless. On the other hand, wasn’t the
Humanity First approach a complete
neurosis? What could you do?

He reached into his soul for an
article of fundamental faith, found it.
“I can make money,” he quoted to
himself. “That’s what I’m good for.
That’s what I can always do.”

As they spun to a stop before the
dumpy, brown-brick armory that the
SIC had appropriated for its own use,
he had a shock. Across the street was
a small cigar store, the only one on the
block. Brand names which had deco-
rated the plate-glass window in all the
colors of the copyright had been sup-
planted recently by great gilt slogans.
Familiar slogans they were by now —

FIREWATER

but this close to a UM office, the
Special Investigating Commission it-
self?

At the top of- the window, the pro-
prietor announced his affiliation in two
huge words that almost screamed their
hatred across the street:

HUMANITY FIRST!

Underneath these, in the exact cen-
ter of the window, was the large
golden initial of the organization, the
wedded letters HF arising out of the
huge, symbolic safety razor.

And under that, in straggling script,
the theme repeated, reworded and
sloganized :

“ Humanity first, last and all the
time! ”

The upper part of the door began to
get nasty:

“ Deport the Aliens! Send them hack
to wherever they came from! ”

And the bottom of the door made
the store-front’s only concession to
business :

“Shop here! Shop Humanitarian!"

“ Humanitarian !” Funatti nodded
bitterly beside Hebster. “Ever see
what’s left of a Primey if a bunch of
Firsters catch him without SIC pro-
tection? Just about enough to pick up
with a blotter. I don’t imagine you’re
too happy about boycott-shops like
that?”

Hebster managed a chuckle as they
walked past the saluting, green-uni-
formed guards. “There aren’t very
many Primey-inspired gadgets having

25

this among entirely transient cus-
tomers who not only don’t object to
his Firstism but are willing to forego
the interesting new gimmicks and
lower prices in standard items that
Primey technology is giving us.

Therefore , it is entirely possible — ;
from this one extremely random but

to do with tobacco. And if there were,
one Shop Humanitarian outfit isn’t
going to break me.”

But it is, he told himself discon-
solately. It is going to break me — if it
means what it seems to. Organization
membership is one thing and so is
planetary patriotism, but business is
something else.

Hebster’s lips moved slowly, in half-
remembered catechism: Whatever the
proprietor believes in or does not

believe in, he has to make a certain
amount of money out of that place if
he’s going to keep the door free of
bailiff stickers. He can’t do it if he
offends the greater part of his possible
clientele.

Therefore, since he’s still in business
and, from all outward signs, doing
quite well, it’s obvious that he doesn’t
have to depend on across- th e-street
UM personnel. Therefore, there must
be a fairly substantial trade to offset

ASTOUNDING SCIEN CE'-F ICTI ON

highly significant sample — -that the news-
papers I read have been lying and the
socio-economists I employ arc incom-
petent. It is entirely possible that the
buying public, the only aspect of the
public in which I have the slightest in-
terest, is beginning a shift in general
viewpoint which will profoundly affect
its purchasing orientation.

It is possible that the entire UM
economy is now at the top of a long
slide into Humanity First domination,
the secure zone of fanatic blindness
demarcated by men like Vandermeer
Dempsey. Tire highly usurious, com-
mercially speculative economy of Im-
perial Rome made a similar transition
in the much slower historical pace of
two millennia ago and became, in
three brief centuries, a static unbusi-
nesslike world in which banking was a
sin and wealth which had not been
inherited was gross and dishonorable.

Meanwhile, people may already have
begun to judge manufactured items on
the basis of morality instead of usability,
Hebster realized, as dim mental notes
took their stolid place beside forming
conclusions. He remembered a folcler-
ful of brilliant explanation Market
Research had sent up last week deal-
ing with unexpected consumer resist-
ance to the new Evvakleen dishware.
He had dismissed the pages of care-
fully developed thesis — to the effect
that women were unconsciously asso-
ciating the product’s name with a
certain Katherine Ewakios who had
recently made the front page of every

tabloid in the world by dint of some-
fast work with a breadknife on the
throats of her five children and two
lovers — with a yawning smile after
examining its first brightly colored
chart.

“Probably nothing more than nor-
mal housewifely suspicion of a radi-
cally new idea,” he had muttered,
“after washing dishes for years, to be
told it’s no longer necessary! She can’t
believe her Evvakleen dish is still the
same after stripping the outermost film
of molecules after a meal. Have to hit
that educational angle a bit harder —
maybe tie it in with the expendable
molecules lost by the skin during a
shower.”

He’d penciled a few notes on the
margin and flipped the whole problem
onto the restless lap of Advertising
and Promotion.

But then there had been the sea-
sonal slump in furniture — about a
month ahead of schedule. The surpris-
ing lack of interest in the Hebster
Chubbichair, an item which should
have revolutionized men’s sitting
habits.

Abruptly, he could remember al-
most a dozen unaccountable disturb-
ances in the market recently, and all
in consumer goods. That fits, he
decided; any change in buying habits
wouldn’t be reflected in heavy indus-
try for at least a year. The machine
tools plants would feel it before the
steel mills; the mills before the smelt-
ing and refining combines; and the

FIREWATER

27

banks and big investment houses
would be the last of the dominoes to
topple.

With its capital so thoroughly tied
up in research and new production, his
business wouldn’t survive even a tem-
porary shift of this type. Hebster
Securities, Inc. could go like a speck of
lint being blown off a coat collar.

Which is a long way to travel from a
simple little cigar store. Funatti’s jitters
about growing Firstist sentiment are
contagious! he thought.

If only Kleimbocher could crack the
communication problem! If we could
talk to the Aliens, find some sort of place
for ourselves in their universe. The
Firsters would be left without a single
political leg!

Hebster realized they were in a
large, untidy, map-spattered office and
that his escort was saluting a huge,
even more untidy man who waved
their hands down impatiently and
nodded them out of the door. He mo-
tioned Hebster to a choice of seats.
This consisted of several long walnut-
stained benches scattered about the
room.

P. Braganza, said the desk name-
plate with ornate Gothic flow. P. Bra-
ganza had a long, twirlable and tre-
mendously thick mustache. Also, P.
Braganza needed a haircut badly. It
was as if he and everything in the room
had been carefully designed to give the
maximum affront to Humanity First-
ers. Which, considering their crew-cut,

28

closely-shaven, “Cleanliness is next
to Manliness” philosophy, meant that
there was a lot of gratuitous unpleas-
antness in this office when a raid on a
street demonstration filled it with
jostling fanatics, antiseptically clean
and dressed with bare-bone simplicity
and neatness.

“So you’re worrying about Firster
effect on business?”

Hebster looked up, startled.

“No, I don’t read your mind,”
Braganza laughed through tobacco-
stained teeth. He gestured at the win-
dow behind his desk. “ I saw you jump
just the littlest bit when you noticed
that cigar store. And then you stared
at it for two full minutes. I knew what
you were thinking about.”

“Extremely perceptive of you,”
Hebster remarked dryly.

The SIC official shook his head in a
violent negative. “No, it wasn’t. It
wasn’t a bit perceptive. I knew what
you were thinking about because I sit
up here day after day staring at that
cigar store and thinking exactly the
same thing. Braganza, I tell myself,
that’s the end of your job. That’s the
end of scientific world government.
Right there on that cigar-store win-
dow.”

He glowered at his completely lit-
tered desk top for a moment. Hebster’s
instincts woke up — there was a sales
talk in the wind. He realized the man
was engaged in the unaccustomed ex-
ercise of looking for a conversational
gambit. He felt an itch of fear crawl up

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

his intestines. Why should the SIC,
whose power was almost above law
and certainly above governments, be
trying to dicker with him?

Considering his reputation for ask-
ing questions with the snarling end of
a rubber hose, Braganza was being
entirely too gentle, too talkative, too
friendly. Hebster felt like a trapped
mouse into whose disconcerted ear a
cat was beginning to pour complaints
about the dog upstairs.

“ Hebster, tell me something. What
are your goals?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“What do you want out of life?
What do you spend your days plan-
ning for, your nights dreaming about?
Yost likes the girls and wants more of
them. Funatti’s a family man, five
kids. He’s happy in his work because
his job’s fairly secure, and there are all
kinds of pensions and insurance pol-
icies to back up his life.”

Braganza lowered his powerful head
and began a slow, reluctant pacing in
front of the desk.

“Now, I’m a little different. Not
that I mind being a glorified cop. I
appreciate the regularity with which
the finance office pays my salary, of
course; and there are very few women
in this town who can say that I have
received an offer of affection from
them with outright scorn. But the one
thing for which I would lay down my
life is United Mankind. Would lay
down my life? In terms of blood pres-
sure and heart strain you might say

FIREWATER

I’ve already done it! Braganza, I tell
myself, you’re a lucky dope. You’re
working for the first world government
in human history. Make it count.”

He stopped and spread his arms in
front of Hebster. His unbuttoned
green jerkin came apart awkwardly
and exposed the black slab of hair on
his chest. “ That’s me. That’s basically
all there is to Braganza. Now if we’re
to talk sensibly I have to know as
much about you. I ask — what are your
goals?”

The President of Hebster Securities,
Inc., wet his lips. “I’m afraid I’m even
less complicated.”

“That’s all right,” the other man
encouraged. “Put it any way you
like.”

“You might say that before every-
thing else I am a businessman. I am
interested chiefly in becoming a better
businessman, which is to say a bigger
one. In other words, I want to be
richer than I am.”

Braganza peered at him intently.
“And that’s all?”

“All? Haven’t you ever heard it said
that money isn’t everything, but that
what it isn’t it can buy?”

“It can’t buy me.”

Hebster examined him coolly. “ I
don’t know if you’re a sufficiently de-
sirable commodity. I buy what I need,
only occasionally making an exception
to please myself.”

“I don’t like you.” Braganza’s
voice had become thick and ugly. “ I

29

never liked your kind and there’s no
sense being polite. I might as well stop
trying. I tell you straight out — I think
your guts stink.”

Hebster rose. “In that case^ I be-
lieve I should thank you for — ”

“Sit down 1 You were asked here for
a reason. I don’t see any point to it,
but we’ll go through the motions. Sit
down.”

Hebster sat. He wondered idly if
Braganza received half the salary he
paid Greta Seidenheim. Of course,
Greta was talented in many different
ways and performed several distinct
and separately useful services. No,
after tax and pension deductions, Bra-
ganza was probably fortunate to re-
ceive one third of Greta’s salary.

He noticed that a newspaper was
being proffered him. He took it. Bra-
ganza grunted, clumped back behind
his. desk and swung his swivel chair
around to face the window.

It was a week-old copy of The Eve-
ning Humanitarian. The paper had
lost the “ voice-of-a-small-but-highly-
articulate-minority ” look, Hebster re-
membered from his last reading of it,
and acquired the feel of publishing big
business. Even if you cut in half the
circulation claimed by the box in the
upper left-hand corner, that still gave
them three million paying readers.

In the upper right-hand corner, a
red-bordered box exhorted the faithful
to “Read Humanitarian!” A green
streamer across the top of the first
page announced that “ Making sense

30

is human — to gibber, Prime! ”

But the important item was in the
middle of the page. A cartoon.

Half-a-dozen Primeys wearing long,
curved beards and insane, tongue-
lolling grins, sat in a rickety wagon.
They held reins attached to a group of
straining and portly gentlemen dressed
— somewhat simply — in high silk hats.
The fattest and ugliest of these, the
one in the lead, had a bit between his
teeth. The bit was labeled “crazy-
money” and the man, “Algernon
Hebster.”

Crushed and splintering under the
wheels of the wagon were such varied
items as a “Home Sweet Home”
framed motto with a piece of wall at-
tached, a clean-cut youngster in a Boy
Scout uniform, a streamlined locomo-
tive and a gorgeous young woman
with a squalling infant under each
arm.

The caption inquired starkly: “Lords
of Creation — Or Serfs? ”

“This paper seems to have devel-
oped into a fairly filthy scandal sheet,”
Hebster mused out loud. “I shouldn’t
be surprised if it makes money.”

“I take it then,” Braganza asked
without turning around from his con-
templation of the street, “that you
haven’t read it very regularly in recent
months?”

“I am happy to say I have not.”

“That was a mistake.”

Hebster stared at the clumped locks
of black hair. “Why?” he asked care-

ASTOUND IN G SC IENCE -FICTION

fully.

“Because it has developed into a
thoroughly filthy and extremely suc-
cessful scandal sheet. You’re its chief
scandal.” Braganza laughed. “You
see these -people look upon Prirney
dealing as more of a sin than a crime.
And, according to that morality,
you’re close to Old Nick himself!”

Shutting his eyes for a moment,
Hebster tried to understand people
who imagined such a soul-satisfying
and beautiful concept as profit to be a
thing of dirt and crawling maggots. He
sighed. “I’ve thought of Firstism as a
religion myself.”

That seemed to get the SIC man.
He swung around excitedly and pointed
with both forefingers. “I tell you that
you are right! It crosses all boundaries
— incompatible and warring creeds are
absorbed into it. It is willful, witless
denial of a highly painful fact — that
there are intellects abroad in the uni-
verse which are superior to our own.
And the denial grows in strength every
day that we are unable to contact the
Aliens. If, as seems obvious, there is no
respectable place for humanity in this
galactic civilization, why, say men like
Vandermeer Dempsey, then let us pre-
serve our self-conceit at the least. Let’s
stay close to and revel in the things
that are undeniably human. In a few
decades, the entire human race will
have been sucked into this blinkered
vacuum.”

He rose and walked around the desk
again. His voice had assumed a ter-

FIREWATER

ribly earnest, tragically pleading qual-
ity. His eyes roved Hebster’s face as if
searching for a pin-point of weakness,
an especially thin spot in the frozen
calm.

“Think of it,” he asked Hebster.
“Periodic slaughters of scientists and
artists who, in the judgment of Demp-
sey, have pushed out too far from the
conventional center of so-called hu-
manness. An occasional auto-da-fe in
honor of a merchant caught selling
Prirney goods — ”

“I shouldn’t like that,” Hebster ad-
mitted, smiling. He thought a moment.
“I see the connection you’re trying to
establish with the cartoon in The Eve-
ning H mnanitarian . ’ ’

“Mister, I shouldn’t have to. They
want your head on the top of a long
stick. They want it because you ’ve be-
come a symbol of dealing successfully
for your own ends, with these stellar
foreigners, or at least their human
errand-boys and chambermaids. They
figure that, maybe they can put a. stop
to Primey-dealing generally if they
put a bloody stop to you. And I tell
you this — maybe they are right.”
“What exactly do you propose?”
Hebster asked in a low voice.

“That you come in with us. We’ll
make an honest man of you — offi-
cially. We want you directing our in-
vestigation; except that the goal will
not be an extra buck but all-important
interracial communication and even-
tual interstellar negotiation.”

The president of Hebster Securities,

31 .

• l

Inc. gave himself a few minutes on
that one. He wanted to work out a
careful reply. And he wanted time —
above all, he wanted time!

He was so close to a well-integrated
and world- wide commercial empire!
For ten years, he had been carefully
fitting the component industrial king-
doms into place, establishing suze-
rainty in this production network and
squeezing a little more control out of
that economic satrapy. He had found
delectable tidbits of power in the dis-
solution of his civilization, endless op-
portunities for wealth in the shards of
his race’s self-esteem. He required a
bare twelve months now to consolidate
and co-ordinate. And suddenly — with
the open-mouthed shock of a Jim
Fiske who had cornered gold on the
Exchange only to have the United
States Treasury defeat him by releas-
ing enormous quantities from the
Government’s own hoard — suddenly,
Hebster realized he wasn’t going to
have the time. He was too experienced
a player not to sense that a new factor
was coming into the game, something
outside his tables of actuarial figures,
his market graphs and cargo loading
indices.

, His mouth was clogged with the
heavy nausea of unexpected defeat. He
forced himself to answer:

“I’m flattered. Braganza, I really
am flattered. I see that Dempsey has
linked us — we stand or fall together.
But — I’ve always been a loner. With
whatever help I can buy, I take care

32

of myself. I’m not interested in any
goal but the extra buck. First and last,
I’m a businessman.”

“Oh, stop it!” the dark man took a
turn up and down the office angrily.
“This is a planet- wide emergency.
There are times when you can’t be a
businessman.”

“I deny that. I can’t conceive of
such a time.”

Braganza snorted. “You can’t be a
businessman if you’re strapped to a
huge pile of blazing faggots. You can’t
be a businessman if people’s minds are
so thoroughly controlled that they’ll
stop eating at their leader’s command.
You can’t be a businessman, my slav-
ering, acquisitive friend, if demand is
so well in hand that it ceases to exist.”

“That’s impossible!” Hebster had
leaped to his feet. To his amazement,
he heard his voice climbing up the
scale to hysteria. “There’s always de-
mand. Always! The trick is to find
what new form it’s taken and then
fill it!”

“Sorry! I didn’t mean to make fun
of your religion.”

Hebster drew a deep breath and sat
down with infinite care. He could al-
most feel his red corpuscles simmering.

Take it easy, he warned himself,
take it easy! This is a man who must
be won, not antagonized. They’re
changing the rules of the market, Heb-
ster, and you’ll need every friend you
can buy.

Money won’t work with this fellow.

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

But there are other values —

“Listen to me, Braganza. We’re up
against the psycho-social consequences
of an extremely advanced civilization
hitting a comparatively barbarous
one. Are you familiar with Professor
Kleimbocher’s Firewater Theory?”
“That the Alien’s logic hits us men-
tally in the same way as whisky hit
the North American Indian? And the
Primeys, representing our finest minds,
are the equivalent of those Indians
who had the most sympathy with the
white man’s civilization? Yes. It’s a
strong analogy. Even carried to the
Indians who, lying sodden with liquor
in the streets of frontier towns, helped
create the illusion of the treacherous,
lazy, kill-you-for-a-drink aborigines
while being so thoroughly despised by
their tribesmen that they didn’t dare
go home for fear of having their
throats cut. I’ve always felt — ”

“The only part of that I want to
talk about,” Hebster interrupted, “is
the firewater concept. Back in the
Indian villages, an ever-increasing
majority became convinced that fire-
water and gluttonous paleface civiliza-
tion were synonymous, that they must
rise and retake their land forcibly,
killing in the process as many drunken
renegades as they came across. This
group can be equated with the Hu-,
manity Firsters. Then there was a
minority who recognized the white
man’s superiority in numbers and
weapons, and desperately tried to find
a way of coming to terms with his

FIREWATER

civilization — terms that would not
include his booze. For them read the
UM. Finally, there was my kind of
Indian.”

Braganza knitted voluminous eye-
brows and hitched himself up to a
corner of the desk. “Hah?” he in-
quired. “What kind of Indian were
you, Hebster?”

“The kind who had enough sense to
know that the paleface had not the
slightest interest in saving him from
slow and painful cultural anemia. The
kind of Indian, also, whose instincts
were sufficiently sound so that he was
scared to death of innovations like
firewater and wouldn’t touch the stuff
to save himself from snake bite. But
the kind of Indian — ”

“Yes? Goon!”

“The kind who was fascinated by
the strange transparent container in
which the firewater came! Think how
covetous an Indian potter might be of
the whisky bottle, something which
was completely outside the capacity
of his painfully acquired technology.
Can’t you see him hating, despising
and terribly afraid of the smelly amber
fluid, which toppled the most stalwart
warriors, yet wistful to possess a bottle
minus contents? That’s about where
I see myself, Braganza — the Indian
whose greedy curiosity shines through
the murk of hysterical clan politics
and outsiders’ contempt like a lambent
flame. I want the new kind of con-
tainer somehow separated from the
firewater.”

33

Unblinkingly, the great dark eyes
stared at his face. A hand came up and
smoothed each side of the arched
mustachio with long, unknowing twirls.
Minutes passed.

“ Well. Hebster as our civilization’s
noble savage,” the SIC man chuckled
at last, “it almost feels right. But what
does it mean in terms of the overall
problem?”

“I’ve told you,” Hebster said
wearily, hitting the arm of the bench
with his open hand, “that I haven’t
the slightest interest in the overall
problem.”

“And you only want the bottle. I
heard you. But you’re not a potter,
Hebster — you haven’t an elementary
particle of craftsman’s curiosity. All
of that historical romance you spout —
you don’t care if your world drowns
in its own agonized juice. You just
want a profit.”

“I never claimed an altruistic rea-
son. I leave the general solution to men
whose minds are good enough to juggle
its complexities— like Kleimbocher.”

“Think somebody like Kleimbocher
could do it?”

“I’m almost certain he will. That
was our mistake from the beginning —
trying to break through with historians
and psychologists. Either they’ve be-
come limited by the study of human
societies or — well, this is personal, but
I’ve always felt that the science of the
mind attracts chiefly those who’ve
already experienced grave psycho-

34

logical difficulty. While they might
achieve such an understanding of
themselves in the course of their work
as to become better adjusted even-
tually than individuals who had less
problems to begin with, I’d still con-
sider them too essentially unstable for
such an intrinsically shocking experi-
ence as establishing rapport with an
Alien. Their internal dynamics in-
evitably make Primeys of them.”
Braganza sucked at a tooth and
considered the wall behind Hebster.
“And all this, you feel, wouldn’t apply
to Kleimbocher?”

“No, not a philology professor. He
has no interest, no intellectual roots
in personal and group instability.
Kleimbocher’s a comparative linguist
— a technician, really — a specialist in
basic communication. I’ve been out
to the university and watched him
work. His approach to the problem is
entirely in terms of his subject-
communicating with the Aliens in-
stead of trying to understand them.
There’s been entirely too much intri-
cate speculation about Alien con-
sciousness, sexual attitudes and social
organization, about stuff from which
we will derive no tangible and im-
mediate good. Kleimbocher’s com-
pletely pragmatic.”

“All right. I follow you. Only he
went Prime this morning.”

Hebster paused, a sentence dangling
from his dropped jaw. “Professor
Kleimbocher? Rudolf Kleimbocher?”
he asked idiotically. “But he was so

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

close . . . he almost had it ... an
elementary signal dictionary ... he
was about to — ”

“He did. About nine forty-five.
He’d been up all night with a Primey
one of the psych professors had man-
aged to hypnotize and gone home
unusually optimistic. In the middle
of his first class this morning, he in-
terrupted himself in a lecture on
medieval cyrillic to ... to gabble-
honk. He sneezed and wheezed at the
students for about ten minutes in the
usual Primey pattern of initial irrita-
tion, then, abruptly giving them up as
hopeless, worthless idiots, he levitated
himself in that eerie way they almost
always do at first. Banged his head
against the ceiling and knocked him-
self out. I don’t know what it was,
fright, excitement, respect for the old
boy perhaps, but the students neg-
lected to tie him up before going for
help. By the time they’d come back
with the campus SIC man, Kleim-
bocher had revived and dissolved one
wall of the Graduate School to get out.
Here’s a snapshot of him about five
hundred feet in the air, lying on his
back with his arms crossed behind his
head, skimming west at twenty miles
an hour.”

The executive studied the little pa-
per rectangle with blinking eyes.
“You radioed the air force to chase
him, of course.”

“-What’s the use? We’ve been
-through that enough times. He’d either

FIREWATER

increase his speed and generate a
tornado, drop like a stone and get
himself smeared all over the country-
side or materialize stuff like wet
coffee grounds and gold ingots inside
the jets of the pursuing plane. No-
body’s caught a Primey yet in the
first flush of . . . whatever they do
feel at first. And we might stand to
lose anything from a fairly expensive
hunk of aircraft, including pilot, to a
couple of hundred acres of New Jersey
topsoil.”

Hebster groaned. “But the eighteen
years of research that he represented ! ”

“Yeah. That’s where we stand.
Blind Alley umpteen hundred thou-
sand or thereabouts. Whatever the
figure is, it’s awfully close to the end.
If you can’t crack the Alien on a
straight linguistic basis, you can’t
crack the Alien at all, period, end
of paragraph. Our most powerful
weapons affect them like bubble pipes,
and our finest minds are good for
nothing better than to serve them in
low, fawning idiocy. But the Primeys
are all that’s left. We might be able to
talk sense to the Man if not the
Master.”

“Except that Primeys, by defini-
tion, don’t talk sense.”

Braganza nodded. “But since they
were human — ordinary human — to
start with, they represent a hope. We
always knew we might some day have
to fall back on our only real contact.
That’s why the Primey protective
laws are so rigid; why the Primey

35

reservation compounds •• surrounding
Alien settlements are guarded by our
military detachments. The lynch
spirit has been evolving into the
pogrom spirit as human resentment
and discomfort have been growing.
Humanity First is beginning to feel
strong enough to challenge United
Mankind. And honestly, Hebster, at
this point neither of us know which
would survive a real fight. But you’re
one of the few who have talked to
Primeys, worked with them — ”

“Just on business.”

“Frankly, that much of a start is a
thousand times further along than
the best that we’ve been able to man-
age. It’s so blasted ironical that the
only people who’ve had any conversa-
tion at all with the Primej'S aren’t
even slightly interested in the im-
minent collapse of civilization! Oh,
well. The point is that in the present
political picture, you sink with us.
Recognizing this, my people are pre-
pared to forget a great deal and docu-
ment you back into respectability.
How about it?”

“Funny,” Hebster said thought-
fully. “It can’t be knowledge that
makes miracle-workers out of fairly
sober scientists. They all start shoot-
ing lightnings at their families and
water out of rocks far too early in
Primacy to have had time to learn
new techniques. It’s as if by merely
coming close enough to the Aliens to
grovel, they immediately move into
position to tap a series of cosmic laws

36

annual alimony dividend bonus. I’ll

more basic than cause and effect.”

The SIC man’s face slowly deep-
ened into purple. “Well, are you
coming in, or aren’t you? Remember
Hebster, in these times, a man who
insists on business as usual is a traitor
to history.”

“I think Kleimbocher is the end.,”
Hebster nodded to himself. “Not
much point in chasing Alien mentality
if you’re going to lose your best men
on the way. I say let’s forget all this
nonsense of trying to live as equals in
the same universe with Aliens. Let’s
concentrate on human problems and
be grateful that they don’t come
into our major population centers and
tell us to shove over.”

The telephone rang. Braganza. had
dropped back into his swivel chair.
He let the instrument squeeze out
several piercing sonic bubbles while
he clicked his strong square teeth and
maintained a carefully-focused glare
at his visitor. Finally, he picked it up,
and gave it the verbal minima:

“Speaking. He is here. I’ll tell him.
’Bye.”

He brought his lips together, kept
them pursed for a moment and then,
abruptly, swung around to face the
window.

“Your office, Hebster. Seems your
wife and son are in town and have to
see you on business. She the one you
divorced ten years ago?”

Hebster nodded at his back and rose
once more. “Probably wants her semi-

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

have to go. Sonia never does office
morale any good.”

This meant trouble, he knew.
“ Wife-and-son ” was executive code
for something seriously, wrong with
Hebster Securities, Inc. He had not
seen his wife since she had been
satisfactorily maneuvered into giving
him' control of his son’s education. As
far as he was concerned, she had
earned a substantial income for life
by providing him with a well-mothered
heir.

FIREWATER

“Listen!” Braganza said sharply
as Hebster reached the door. He still
kept his eyes studiously on the street.
“I tell you this: You don’t want to
come in with us. All right! You’re a
businessman first and a world citizen
second. All right! But keep your nose
clean, Hebster. If we catch you the
slightest bit off base from now on,
you’ll get hit with everything. We’ll
not only pull the most spectacular
trial this corrupt old planet has ever
seen, but somewhere along the line,
we’ll throw you and your entire

37

organization to the wolves. We’ll see
to it that Humanity First pulls the
Hebster Tower down around your
ears.”

Hebster shook his head, licked his
lips. “Why? What would that ac-
complish?”

“Hah! It would give a lot of us-
here the craziest kind of pleasure. But
it would also relieve us temporarily of
some of the mass pressure we’ve been
feeling. There’s always the chance
that Dempsey would lose control of
his hotter heads, that they’d go on a
real gory rampage, make with the
sound and the fury sufficiently to
justify full deployment of troops. We
could knock off Dempsey and all of
the big-shot Firsters then, because
John Q. United Mankind would have
seen to his own vivid satisfaction and
injury what a dangerous mob they
are.”

“This,” Hebster commented bit-
terly, “is the idealistic, legalistic
world government ! ”

Braganza’s chair spun around to
face Hebster and his fist came down
on the desk top with all the crushing
finality of a magisterial gavel. “No,
it is not! It is the SIC, a plenipoten-
tiary and highly practical bureau of
the UM, especially created to organ-
ize a relationship between Alien and
human. Furthermore, it’s the SIC in a
state of the greatest emergency when
the reign of law and world govern-
ment may topple at a demagogue’s
belch. Do you think” — his head

38

snaked forward belligerently, his eyes
slitted to thin lines of purest con-
tempt — “that the career and fortune,
even the life, let us say, of as openly
selfish a slug as you, Hebster, would
be placed above that of the repre-
sentative body of two billion socially
operating human beings?”

The SIC official thumped his slop-
pily buttoned chest. “ Braganza, I tell
myself now, you’re lucky he’s too
hungry for his blasted profit to take
you up on that offer. Think how much
fun it’s going to be to sink a hook
into him when he makes a mistake at
last! To drop him onto the back of
Humanity First so that they’ll run
amuck and destroy themselves! Oh, 1
get out, Hebster. I’m through with
you.”

He had made a mistake, Hebster
reflected as he walked out of the
armory and snapped his fingers at a
gyrocab. The SIC was the most power-
ful single ’ government agency in a
Primey-infested world; offending them
for a man in his position was equiva-
lent to a cab driver delving into the
more uncertain aspects of a traffic
cop’s ancestry in the policeman’s pop-
eyed presence.

But what could he do? Working
with the SIC would mean working
under Braganza — and since maturity,
Algernon Hebster had been quietly
careful to take orders from no man.
It would mean giving up a business
which, with a little more work and a

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

little more time, might somehow still
become the dominant combine on the
planet. And worst of all, it would
mean acquiring a social orientation to
replace the calculating businessman’s
viewpoint which was the closest thing
to a sou! he had ever known.

The doorman of his building pre-
ceded him at a rapid pace down the
side corridor that led to his private
elevator and flourished aside for him
to enter. The car stopped on the
twenty-third floor. With a heart that
had sunk so deep as to have prac-
tically foundered, Hebster picked his
way along the wide-eyed clerical
stares that lined the corridor. At the
entrance to General Laboratory 23B,
two tall men in the gray livery of his
personal bodyguard moved apart to
let him enter. If they had been re-
called after having been told to take
the clay off, it meant that a full-dress
emergency was being observed. He
hoped that it had been declared in
time t'o prevent any publicity leakage.

It had, Greta Seidenheim assured
him. “I was down here applying the
damps five minutes after the fuss
began. Floors twenty-one through
twenty-five are closed off and all out-
side lines are being monitored. You
can keep your employees an hour at
most past five o’clock — which gives
you a maximum of two hours and four-
teen minutes.”

He followed her green-tipped finger-
nail to the far corner of the lab -where
a body lay wrapped in murky rags.

FIR EWATF.R

Theseus. Protruding from his back
was the yellowed ivory handle of
quite an old German S. S. dagger,
1942 edition. The silver swastika on
the hilt had been replaced by an
ornate symbol — an HF. Blood had
soaked Theseus’ long matted hair into
an ugly red rug.

A dead Priiney, Hebster thought,
staring down hopelessly. In his build-
ing, in the laboratory to which the
Primey had been spirited two or three
jumps ahead of Yost and Funatti.
This was capital offense material — if
the courts ever got a chance to weigh
it.

“Look at the dirty Prkney-lover!”
a slightly familiar voice jeered on his
right. “He’s scared! Make money out
of that, Hebster!”

The corporation president strolled
over to the thin man with the knobby,
completely shaven head who was tied
to an unused steampipe. The man’s
tie, which hung outside his laboratory
smock, sported an unusual ornament
about halfway down. It took Hebster
several seconds to identify it. A minia-
ture gold safety razor upon a black
“3.”

“He’s a third echelon official of
H uma h ity Fi rst! ' ’

“He’s also Charlie Verus of Hebster
Laboratories,” an extremely short
man with a corrugated forehead told
him. “My name is Margritt, Mr.
Hebster, Dr. J. H. Margritt. I spoke
to you on the communicator when the
Primeys arrived.”

39

Hebster shook his head determin-
edly. He waved back the other scien-
tists who were milling around him
self-consciously. “How long have
third echelon officials, let alone ordi-
nary members of Humanity First,
been receiving salary checks in my
laboratories?”

“I don’t know.” Margritt shrugged
up at him. “Theoretically, no Firsters
can be Hebster employees. Personnel
is supposed to be twice as efficient’ as
the SIC when it comes to sifting back-
ground. They probably are. But what
can they do when an employee joins
Humanity First after he’s passed his
probationary period? These proselyt-
ing times you’d need a complete force
of secret police to keep tabs on all the
new converts!”

“When I spoke to. you earlier in the
day, Margritt, you indicated disap-
proval of Verus. Don’t you think it
was your duty to let me know I had a
Firster official about to mix it up with
Primeys?”

The little man beat a violent nega-
tive back and forth with his chin.
“ I’m paid to supervise research, Mr.
Hebster, not to co-ordinate your labor
relations nor vote your political
ticket ! ”

Contempt — the contempt of the
creative researcher for the business-
man-entrepreneur who paid his salary
and was now in serious trouble —
flickered behind every word lie spoke.
Why, Hebster wondered irritably, did
people so despise a man who made

40

money? Even the Primeys back in his
office, Yost and Funatti, Braganza,
Margritt — who had worked in his
laboratories for years. It was his only
talent. Surely, as such, it was as valid
as a pianist’s?

“I’ve never liked Charlie Verus,”
the lab chief went on, “but we never
had reason to suspect him of Firstism !
He must have hit the third echelon
rank about a week ago, eh, Bert?”

“Yeah,” Bert agreed from across
the room. “The day he came in an
hour late, broke every Florence flask
in the place and told us all dreamily
that one day we might be very proud
to tell our grandchildren that we’d
worked in the same lab with Charles
Bolop Verus.”

“Personally,” Margritt commented,
“ I thought he might have just finished
writing a book which proved that the
Great Pyramid was nothing more
than a prophecy in stone of our mod-
ern textile designs. Verus was that
kind. But it probably was his little
safety razor that tossed him up so
high. I’d say he got the promotion
as a sort of payment in advance for
the job he finally did today.”

Hebster ground his teeth at the
carefully hairless captive who tried,
unsuccessfully, to spit in his face; he
hurried back to the door where his
private secretary was talking to the
bodyguard who had been on duty in
the lab.

Beyond them, against the wall,
stood Larry and S. S. Lusitania con-

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

versing in a low-voiced and anxious
gabble-honk. They were evidently
profoundly disturbed. S. S. Lusitania
kept plucking tiny little elephants out
of her rags which, kicking and trum-
peting tinnily, burst like malformed
bubbles as she dropped them on the
floor. Larry scratched his tangled
beard nervously as he talked, pe-
riodically waving a hand at the ceiling
which was already studded with fifty
or sixty replicas of the dagger buried
in Theseus. Hebster couldn’t help
thinking anxiously of what could have
happened to his building if the
I'rimeys had been able to act human
enough to defend themselves.

“Listen, Mr. Hebster,” the body-
guard began, “ I was told not to — ”
“Save it,” Hebster rapped out.
“This wasn’t your fault. Even Per-
sonnel isn’t to blame. Me and my ex-
perts deserve to have our necks
chopped for falling so far behind the
times. We can analyze any trend but
the one which will make us super-
fluous. Greta! I want my roof helicop-
ter ready to fly and my personal
stratojet at LaGuardia alerted. Move,
girl! And you . . . Williams is it?”
he queried, leaning forward to read
the bodyguard’s name on his badge,
“Williams, pack these two Primeys
into my helicopter upstairs and stand
by for a fast take-off.”

He turned. “Everyone else!” he
called. “You will be allowed to go
home at six. You will be paid one
hour’s overtime. Thank you.”

FIREWATER

Charlie Verus started to sing as
Hebster left the lab. By the time he
reached the elevator, several of the
clerks in the hallway had defiantly
picked up the hymn. Hebster paused
outside the elevator as he realized
that fully one-fourth of the clerical
personnel, male and female, were
following Venus’ cracked and mourn-
ful but terribly earnest tenor.

Mine eyes have seen the coming of
the glory of the shorn:

We will overturn the cess- pool
where the Primey slime is born ,

We'll be wearing cleanly garments
as we face a human morn —

The First arc on the march!

Glory, glory, hallelujah ,

Glory, glory, hallelujah . . .

If it was like this in Hebster Securi-
ties, he thought wryly as he came into
his private office, how fast was Hu-
manity First growing among the
broad masses of people? Of course,
many of those singing could be put
down as sympathizers rather than
converts, people who were suckers for
choral groups and vigilante posses —
but how much more momentum did
an organization have to generate to
acquire the name of political jug-
gernaut?

The only encouraging aspect was
the SIC’s evident awareness of the
danger and the unprecedented steps
they were prepared to take as coun-
termeasure.

Unfortunately, the unprecedented

41

steps would take place upon Hebster.

He now had a little less than two
hours, he reflected, to squirm out of
the most serious single crime on the
books of present World Law.

He lifted one of his telephones.
“ Ruth,” he said. “I want to speak to
Vandermeer Dempsey. Get me
through to him personally.”

She did. A few moments later he
heard the famous voice, as rich and
slow and thick as molten gold. “Hello
Hebster, Vandermeer Dempsey speak-
ing.” He paused as if to draw breath,
then went on sonorously: “Humanity
— may it always be ahead, but, ahead or
behind, Humanity!” He chuckled.
“Our newest. What we call our tele-
phone toast. Like it?”

“Very much,” Hebster told him
respectfully, remembering that this
former video quizmaster might shortly
be church and state combined. “Er
. . . Mr. Dempsey, I notice you have
a new book out, and I was wonder-
ing—”

“Which one? ‘ Anthropolitics’?”
“That’s it. A fine study! You have
some very quotable lines in the chap-
ter headed, ‘Neither More Nor Less
Human.’ ”

A raucous laugh that still managed
to bubble heavily. “Young man, I
have quotable lines in every chapter
of every book! I 'maintain a writer’s
assembly line here at headquarters
that is capable of producing up to
fifty-five memorable epigrams on any
subject upon ten minutes’ notice. Not

to mention their capacity for political
metaphors and two-line jokes with
sexy implications! But you wouldn’t
be calling me to discuss literature,
however good a job of emotional engi-
neering I have done in my little text.
What is it about, Hebster? Go into
your pitch.”

“Well,” the executive began,
vaguely comforted by the Firster
chieftain’s cynical approach and
slightly annoyed at the openness of
his contempt, “I had a chat today
with your friend and my friend, P.
Braganza.”

“I know.”

“ You do? How?”

Vandermeer Dempsey laughed
again, the slow, good-natured chortle
of a fat man squeezing the curves out
of a rocking chair. “Spies, Hebster,
spies. I have them everywhere prac-
tically. This kind of politics is twenty
per cent espionage, twenty per cent
organization and sixty per cent wait-
ing for the right moment. My spies
tell me everything you do.”

“They didn’t by any chance tell
you what Braganza and I discussed?”
“Oh, they did, young man, they
did!” Dempsey chuckled a carefree
scale exercise. Hebster remembered
his pictures: the head like a soft and
enormous orange, gouged by a bril-
liant smile. There was no hair any-
where on the head — all of it, down to
the last eyelash and follicled wart,
was removed regularly through elec-
trolysis. “According to my agents,

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

Braganza made several strong repre-
sentations on behalf of the Special
Investigating Commission which you
rightly spurned. Then, somewhat out
of sorts, he announced that if you
were henceforth detected in the ne-
farious enterprises which every one
knows have made you one of the
wealthiest men on the face of the
Earth, he would use you as bait for
our anger. I must say I admire the
whole ingenious scheme immensely.”

“And you’re not going to bite,”
Hebster suggested. Greta Seidenheim
entered the office and made a circular
gesture at the ceiling. He nodded.

“On the contrary, Hebster, we are
going to bite. We’re going to bite
with just a shade more vehemence
than we’re expected to. We’re going to
swallow this provocation that the
SIC is devising for us and go on to
make a world-wide revolution out of
it. We will, my boy.”

Hebster rubbed his left hand back
and forth across his lips. “Over my
dead body!” He tried to chuckle him-
self and managed only to clear his
throat. “You’re right about the con-
versation with Braganza, and you
may be right about how you’ll do
when it gets down to paving stones
and baseball bats. But, if you’d like
to have the whole thing a lot easier,
there is a little deal I have in mind — ”

“Sorry, Hebster my boy. No deals.
Not on this. Don’t you see we really
don’t want to have it easier? For the

FIREWATER

same reason, we pay our spies nothing
despite the risks they run and the
great growing wealth of Humanity
First. We found that the spies we ac-
quired through conviction worked
harder and took many more chances
than those forced into our arms by
economic pressure. No, we desperately
need L’ajfaire Hebster to inflame the
populace. We need enough excitement
running loose so that it transmits to
the gendarmerie and the soldiery, so
that conservative citizens who nor-
mally shake their heads at a parade
will drop their bundles and join the
rape and robbery. Enough such citi-
zens and Terra goes Humanity First.”
“ Heads you win, tails I lose.”

The liquid gold of Dempsey’s laugh-
ter poured. “I see what you mean,
Hebster. Either way, UM or HF, you
wind up a smear-mark on the sands
of time. You had your chance when
we asked for contributions from
public-spirited businessmen four years
ago. Quite a few of your competitors
were able to see the valid relationship
between economics and politics.
Woodran of the Underwood Invest-
ment Trust is a first echelon official
today. Not a single one of your top
executives wears a razor. But, even so,
whatever happens to you will be mild
compared to the Primeys.”

“The Aliens may object to their
body-servants being mauled.”

“There are no Aliens!” Dempsey
replied in a completely altered voice.
He sounded as if he had stiffened too

42

43

much to be able to move his lips.

“No Aliens? Is that your latest
line? You don’t mean that!”

“ There are only Primeys — creatures
who have resigned from human re-
sponsibility and are therefore able to
do many seemingly miraculous things,
which real humanity refuses to do
because of the lack of dignity involved.
But there are no Aliens. Aliens are a
Primey myth.”

Hebster grunted. “That is the ideal
way of facing an unpleasant fact.
Stare right through it.”

“ If you insist on talking about such
illusions as Aliens,” the rustling and
angry voice cut in, “I’m afraid we
can’t continue the conversation.
You’re evidently going Prime, Heb-
ster.”

The line went dead.

Hebster scraped a finger inside the
mouthpiece rim. “ He believes his own
stuff!” he said in an awed voice. “For
all of the decadent urbanity, he has to
have the same reassurance he gives his
followers — the horrible, superior
thing just isn’t there!”

Greta Seidenheim was waiting at
the door with his briefcase and both
their coats. As he came away from the
desk, he said, “ I won’t tell you not to
come along, Greta, but — ”

“Good,” she said, swinging along
behind him. “Think we’ll make it to
— wherever we’re going? ”

“Arizona. The first and largest
Alien settlement. The place our friends

44

with the funny names come from.”

“What can you do there that you
can’t do here?”

“Frankly, Greta, I don’t know.
But it’s a good idea to lose myself for
a while. Then again, I want to get in
the area where all this agony originates
and take a close look. I’m an off-the-
cuff businessman; I’ve done all of my
important figuring on the spot.”

There was bad news waiting for
them outside the helicopter. “Mr.
Hebster,” the pilot told him tone-
lessly while cracking a dry stick of
gum, “the stratojet’s been seized by
the SIC. Are we still going? If we do it
in this thing, it won’t be very far or
very fast.”

“We’re still going,” Hebster said
after a moment’s hesitation.

They climbed in. The two Primeys
sat on the floor in the rear, sneezing
conversationally at each other. Wil-
liams waved respectfully at his boss.
“Gentle as lambs,” he said. “In fact,
they made one. I had to throw it out.”

The large pot-bellied craft climbed
up its rope of air and started forward
from the Hebster Building.

“There must have been a leak,”
Greta muttered angrily. “ They heard
about the dead Primey. Somewhere
in the organization there’s a leak that
I haven’t been able to find. The SIC
heard about the dead Primey and
now they’re hunting us down. Real
efficient, I am!”

Hebster smiled at her grimly. She
was very efficient. So was Personnel

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

and a dozen other subdivisions of the
organization. So was Hebster himself.
But these were functioning members
of a normal business designed for
stable times. Political spies ! If Demp-
sey could have spies and saboteurs all
over Hebster Securities, why couldn’t
Braganza? They’d catch him before he
had even started running; they’d
bring him back before he could find a
loophole.

They’d bring him back for trial,
perhaps, for what in all probability
would be known to history as the
Bloody Hebster Incident. The inci-
dent that had precipitated a world
revolution.

“Mr. Hebster, they’re getting rest-
less,” Williams called out. “Should I
relax ’em out, kind off?”

Hebster sat up sharply, hopefully.
“No,” he said. “Leave them alone!”
He watched the suddenly agitated
Primeys very closely. This was the
odd chance for which he’d brought
them along! Years of haggling with
Primeys had taught him a lot about
them. They were good for other things
than sheer gimmick-craft.

Two specks appeared on the win-
dows. They enlarged sleekly into jets
with SIC insignia.

“Pilot!” Hebster called, his eyes on
Larry who was pulling painfully at his
beard. “Get away from the controls!
Fast! Did you hear me? That was an
order 1 Get away from those controls /”

The man moved off reluctantly. He
was barely in time. The control board

FIREWATER

dissolved into rattling purple shards
behind him. The vanes of the gyro
seemed to flower into indigo saxo-
phones. Their ears rang with super-
sonic frequencies as they rose above
the jets on a spout of unimaginable
force.

Five seconds later they were in
Arizona.

They piled out of their weird craft
into a sage-cluttered desert.

“I don’t ever want to know what
my windmill was turned into,” the
pilot commented, “or what was used
to push it along — but how did the
Primey come to understand the cops
were after us?”

“I don’t think he knew that,”
Hebster explained, “ but he was sensi-
tive enough to know he was going
home, and that somehow those jets
were there to prevent it. And so he
functioned, in terms of his interests,
in what was almost a human fashion.
He protected himself!”

“Going home,” Larry said. He’d
been listening very closely to Hebster,
dribbling from the right-hand corner
of his mouth as he listened. “Haemo-
stat, hammersdarts, hump. Home is
where the hate is. Hit is where the
hump is. Home and locks the door,”

S.S. Lusitania had started on one
leg and favored them with her peculiar
fleshy smile. “Hindsight,” she sug-
gested archly, “is no more than home
site. Gabble, honk? ”

Larry started after her, some three
feet off the ground. He walked the air

45

slowly and painfully as if the road he
traveled were covered with numerous
small boulders all of them pitilessly
sharp.

“Good-by, people,” Hebster said.
“I’m off to see the wizard with my
friends in greasy gray here. Remem-
ber, when the SIC catches up to your
unusual vessel — stay close to it for
that purpose, by the way — it might
be wise to refer to me as someone who
forced you into this. You can tell
them I’ve gone into the wilderness
looking for a solution, figuring that if
I went Prime I’d still be better off
than as a punching bag whose owner-
ship is being hotly disputed by such
characters as P. Braganza. and Van-
dermeer Dempsey. I’ll be back with
my mind or on it.”

He patted Greta’s cheek on the wet
spot; then he walked deftly away in
pursuit of S.S. Lusitania and Larry.
He glanced back once and smiled as
he saw them looking curiously forlorn,
especially Williams, the chunky young
man who earned his living by guard-
ing other people’s bodies.

The Primeys followed a route of
sorts, but it seemed to have been
designed by someone bemused by the
motions of an accordion. Again and
again it doubled back upon itself,
folded across itself, went back a hun-
dred yards and started all over again.

This was Prirney country — Arizona,
where the first and largest Alien set-
tlement had been made. There were

46

mighty few humans in this corner of
the southwest any more — just the
Aliens and their coolies.

“Larry,” Hebster called as an un-
comfortable thought struck him.
“Larry! Do ... do your masters
know I’m coming?”

Missing his step as he looked up at
Plebster’s peremptory question, the
Prirney tripped and plunged to the
ground. He rose, grimaced at Hebster
and shook his head. “You are not a
businessman,” he said. “Here there
can be no business. Here there can
only be humorous what-you- might-
call-worship. The movement to the
universal, the inner nature — The real-
ization, complete and eternal, of the
partial and evanescent that alone ,
enables . . . that alone enables — ”

His clawed fingers writhed into each
other, as if he were desperately trying
to pull a communicable meaning out
of the palms. He shook his head with a
slow rolling motion from side to side.

Hebster saw with a shock that the
old man was crying. Then going Prime
had yet another similarity to madness !

It gave the human an understanding
of something thoroughly beyond him-
self, a mental summit he was con-
stitutionally incapable of mounting. It
gave him a glimpse of some psycho-
logical promised land, then buried
him, still yearning, in his own inade-
quacies. And it left him at last bereft
of pride in his realizable accomplish-
ments with a kind of myopic half- j
knowledge of where he wanted to go

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

but with no means of getting there.

“When I first came,” Larry was
saying haltingly, his eyes squinting
into Hebster’s face, as if he knew what
the businessman was thinking, “when
first I tried to know ... I mean the
charts and textbooks I carried here,
my statistics, my plotted curves were
so useless. All playthings I found,
disorganized, based on shadow-
thought. And then, Hebster, to watch
real-thought, real-control! You’ll see
the joy — You’ll serve beside us, you
will! Oh, the enormous lifting — ”

His voice died into angry inco-
herencies as he bit into his fist. S.S.
Lusitania came up, still hopping on
one foot. “Larry,” she suggested in a
very soft voice, “gabble-honk Hebster
away?”

He looked surprised, then nodded.
The two Primeys linked arms and
clambered laboriously back up to the
invisible road from which Larry had
fallen. They stood facing him for a
moment, looking like a weird, ragged,
surrealistic version of Tweedledee and
Tweedledum.

Then they disappeared and dark-
ness fell around Hebster as if it had
been knocked out of the jar. He felt
under himself cautiously and sat down
on the sand which retained all the
heat of daytime Arizona.

Now!

Suppose an Alien came. Suppose an
Alien asked him point-blank what it
was that he wanted. That would be
bad. Algernon Hebster, businessman

FIREWATER

extraordinary — slightly on the run,
at the moment, of course — didn’t
know what he wanted; not with ref-
erence to Aliens.

He didn’t want them to leave, be-
cause the Prirney technology he had
used in over a dozen industries was
essentially an interpretation and
adaptation of Alien methods. lie
didn’t want them to stay because
whatever was prderly in his world
was dissolving under the acids of their
omnipresent superiority.

He also knew that he personally
did not want to go Prime.

What was left then? Business? Well,
there was Braganza’s question. What
does a businessman do when demand
is so well controlled that it can be
said to have ceased to exist?

Or what does he do in a case like
the present, when demand might be
said to be nonexistent, since there was
nothing the Aliens seemed to want of
Man’s puny hoard?

“He finds something they want,”
Hebster said out loud.

How? Bow? Well, the Indian still
sold his decorative blankets to the
paleface as a way of life, as a source of
income. And he insisted on being paid
in cash — not firewater. If only, Heb-
ster thought, he could somehow con-
trive to meet an Alien — he’d find out
soon enough what its needs were, what
was basically desired.

And then as the retort-shaped, the
tube-shaped, the bell-shaped bottles
materialized all around him, he un-

47

very much like the. girl in Greek
mythology who had begged Zeus for
the privilege of seeing him in the full
regalia of his godhood. A few moments
after her request had been granted,
there had been nothing left of the in-
quisitive female but a fine feathery
ash.

The bottles were swirling in and out
of each other in a strange and intricate
dance from which there radiated emo-
tions vaguely akin to curiosity, yet
partaking of amusement and rap-
ture.

Why rapture? Hebster was positive
he had caught that note, even allow-
ing for the lack of similarity between
mental patterns. He ran a hurried
dragnet through his memory, caught
a few corresponding items and dropped
them after a brief, intensive examina-
tion. What was he trying to remember
— what was his supremely efficient
businessman’s instincts trying to re-
mind him of?

The dance became more complex,
more rapid. A few bottles had passed
under his feet and Hebster could see
them, undulating and spinning some
ten feet below the surface of the
ground as if their presence had made
the Earth a transparent as well as
permeable medium. Completely un-
familiar with all matters Alien as he
was, not knowing — nor caring! — ■
whether they danced as an expression
of the counsel they were taking to-
gether, or as a matter of necessary
social ritual, Hebster was able none

FIREWATER

derstood! They had been forming the
insistent questions in his mind. And
they weren’t satisfied with the answers
he had found thqs far. They liked
answers. They liked answers very
much indeed. If he was interested,
there was always a way — •

A great dots-in-bottle brushed his
cortex and he screamed. “No! I don’t
want to!” lie explained desperately.

Ping! went the dots-in-bottle and
Hebster grabbed at Ids body. His con-
tinuing flesh reassured him. He felt

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

the less to sense an approaching
climax. Little crooked lines of green
lightning began to erupt between the
huge bottles. Something exploded
near his left ear. He rubbed his face
fearfully and moved away. The bottles
followed, maintaining him in the im-
prisoning sphere of their frenzied
movements.

Why rapture? Back in the city, the
Aliens had had a terribly studious air
about them as they hovered, almost
motionless, above the works and lives
of mankind. They were cold and
careful scientists and showed not the
slightest capacity for . . . for — ■

So he had something. At last he had
something. But what do you do with
an idea when you can’t communicate
it and can’t act upon it yourself?

Ping!

The previous invitation was being
repeated, more urgently. Ping! Ping!
Ping!

“No!” he yelled and tried to stand.
He found he couldn’t. “I’m not . . ,
I don’t want to go Prime!”

There was detached, almost divine
laughter.

He felt that awful scrabbling inside
his brain as if two or three entities
were jostling each other within it. He
shut his eyes hard and thought. He
was close, he was very close. Pie had an
idea, but he needed time to formulate
it — a little while to figure out just
exactly what the idea was and just
exactly what to do with it!

Ping , ping, ping! Ping, ping, ping!

49

He had a headache. He felt as if his
mind were being sucked out of his
head. He tried to hold on to it. He
couldn’t.

All right, then. He relaxed abruptly,
stopped trying to protect himself.’
But with his mind and his mouth, he
yelled. For the first time in his life
nail with only a partially formed con-
ception of whom he was addressing
the desperate call to, Algernon Heb-
ster scleamed for help.

f can do it!” he alternately
screamed and thought. “Save money,
save time, save whatever it is you
want to save, whoever you are and
whatever you call yourself— I can
help you save! Help me, help me—
We can do it— but hurry. Your prob-
lem can be solved — Economize. The
balance-sheet — Help — ”

The words and frantic thoughts
spun in and out of each other like the
contracting rings of Aliens all around
him. He kept screaming, kept the
focus on his mental images, while,
unbearably, somewhere inside him, a
gay and jocular force began to close a
valve on his sanity.

Suddenly, he had absolutely no
sensation. Suddenly, he knew dozens
of things he had never dreamed he
could know and had forgotten a
thousand times as many. Suddenly,
he felt that every nerve in his body
was under control of his forefinger.
Suddenly, he —

■ Ping, ping , ping! Ping! Ping! PING'
PING! PING! PING!

50

• • . Like that,” someone said.
What, for example?” someone
else asked.

; ^ ’ they don’t even lie normally.

He’s been sleeping like a human
being. They twist and moan in then-
sleep, the Primeys do, for alf the
world like habitual old drunks. Speak-
ing of moans, here comes our boy.”
Hebster sat up on the army cot,
lattling his head. The fears were leav-
ing him, and, with the fears gone, he
would no longer be hurt. Braganza,
highly concerned and jjnhappy, was
standing next to his bed with a man
who was obviously a doctor. Hebster
smiled at both of them, manfully re-
sisting the temptation to drool out a
string of nonsense syllables.

Hi, fellas, he said. “Here I come,
ungathering nuts in May.”

You don’t mean to tell me you
communicated!” Braganza yelled.
“You communicated and didn’t eo
Prime!”

Hebster raised himself on an elbow
and glanced out past the tent flap to
where Greta Seidenlieim stood on the
other side of a port-armed guard.

He waved his fist at her, and she
nodded a wide-open smile back.

“Found me lying in the desert like
a waif, did you?”

Found you ! ” Braganza spat. “ You
were brought in by Primeys, man.
First time in history they ever did
that. We’ve been waiting for you to
come to in the serene faith that once
you did, everything would be all

right.”

The corporation president rubbed
his forehead. “It will be, Braganza, it
will be. Just Primeys, eh? No Aliens
helping them? ”

“Aliens?” Braganza swallowed.
“What led you to believe — What gave
you reason to hope that . . . that
Aliens would help the Primeys bring
you in?”

“Well, perhaps I shouldn’t have
used the word ‘ help.’ But I did think
there would be a few Aliens in the
group that escorted my unconscious
body back to you. Sort of an honor
guard, Braganza. It would have been
a real nice gesture, don’t you think?”

The SIC man looked at the doctor
who had been following the conversa-
tion with iijjerest. “Mind stepping out
for a minute?” he suggested.

He walked behind the man and
dropped the tent flap into place. Then
he came around to the foot of the army
cot and pulled on his mustache vigor-
ously. “Now, see here, Hebster, if you
keep up this clowning, so help me I
will slit your belly open and snap your
intestines back in your face! What
happened ”

“What happened?” Hebster laughed
and stretched slowly, carefully, as if
lie were afraid of breaking the bones of
his arm. “I don’t think I’ll ever be
able to answer that question com-
pletely. And there’s a section of my
mind that’s very glad that I won’t.
This much I remember clearly: I had
an idea. I communicated it to the

proper and interested party. We con-
cluded — this party and I — a tentative
agreement as agents, the exact terms
of the agreement to be decided by our
principals and its complete ratification
to be contingent upon their accept-
ance. Furthermore, we — All right,
Braganza, all right! I’ll tell it straight.
Put down that folding chair. Remem-
ber, I’ve just been through a pretty
unsettling experience!”

“Not any worse than the world is
about to go through,” the official
growled. “While you’ve been out on
your three-day vacation, Dempsey’s
been organizing a full-dress revolution
every place at once. He’s been very
careful to limit it to parades and verbal
fireworks so that we haven’t been able
to make with the riot squads, but it’s
pretty evident that he’s ready to start
using; muscle. Tomorrow might be it;
he’s spouting on a world-wicle video
hookup and it’s the opinion of the best
experts we have available that his tag
line will be the signal for action. Know
what their slogan is? It concerns Verus
who’s been indicted for murder; they
claim he’ll be a martyr.”

“And you were caught with your
suspicions down. How many SIC men
turned out to be Firsters?”

Braganza nodded. “Not too many,
but more than we expected. More than
we could afford. He’ll do it, Dempsey
will, unless you’ve hit the real thing.
Look, Hebster,” his heavy voice took
on a pleading quality, “don’t play
with me any more. Don’t hold my

astounding science-fiction

FIREWATER

51

threats against me; there was no per-
sonal animosity in them, just a ter-
rible, fearful worry over the world and
its people and the government I was
supposed to protect. If you still have
a gripe against me, I, Braganza, give
you leave to take it out of my hide as
soon as we clear this mess up. But let
me know where we stand first. A lot
of lives and a lot of history depend on
what you did out there in that patch
of desert.”

Hebster told him. He began with
the extraterrestrial Walpurgis Nacht.
“Watching the Aliens slipping in and
out of each other in that cock-eyed and
complicated rhythm, it struck me how
different they were from the thought-
ful dots-in-bottles hovering over our
busy places, how different all creatures
are in their home environments — and
how hard it is to get to know them on
the basis of their company manners.
And then I realized that this place
wasn't their home.”

“Of course. Did you find out which
P ar t of the galaxy they come from?”
“That’s not what I mean. Simply
because we have marked this area off
and others like it in the Gobi, in the
Sahara, in Central Australia — as a
reservation for those of our kind whose
minds have crumbled under the clear,
conscious and certain knowledge of in-
feriority, we cannot assume that the
Aliens around whose settlements they
have congregated have necessarily
settled themselves.”

52

“Huh?” Braganza shook his head
rapidly and batted his eyes.

“In other words we had made an
assumption on the basis of the Aliens’
very evident superiority to ourselves.
But that assumption— and therefore
that superiority — was in our own
terms of what is superior and inferior,
and not the Aliens’. And it especially
might not apply to those Aliens on
• . . the reservation.”

The SIC man took a rapid walk
around the tent. He beat a great fist
into an open sweaty palm. “I’m be-
ginning to, just beginning to — ”
“That’s what I was doing at that
point, just beginning to. Assumptions
that don t stand up under the struc-
ture they’re supposed to support have
caused the ruin of more close-thinking
businessmen than I would like to face
across any conference table. The four
brokers, for example, who, after the
market crash of 1929—”

“All right,” Braganza broke in hur-
riedly, taking a chair near the cot.
“Where did you go from there?”

“I still couldn’t be certain of any-
thing; all I had to go on were a few
random thoughts inspired by extra-
substantial adrenalin secretions and,
of course, the strong feeling that these
particular Aliens weren’t acting the
way I had become accustomed to
expect Aliens to act. They reminded
me of something, of somebody. I was
positive that once I got that memory
tagged, I’d have most of the problem
solved. And I was right.”

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

“How were you right? What was
the memory?”

“Well, I hit it backwards, kind of.
I went back to Professor Kleimbocher’s
analogy about the paleface inflicting
firewater on the Indian. I’ve always
felt that somewhere in that analogy
was the solution. And suddenly, think-
ing of Professor Kleimbocher and
watching those powerful creatures
writhing their way in and around each
other, suddenly I knew what was
wrong. Not the analogy, but our way
of using it. We’d picked it up by the
hammer head instead of the handle.
The paleface gave firewater to the
Indian all right — but he got something
in return.”

“What?”

“Tobacco. Now there’s nothing
very much wrong with tobacco if it
isn’t misused, but the first white men
to smoke probably went as far over-
board as the first Indians to drink.
And both booze and tobacco have this
in common — they make you awfully
sick if you use too much for your
initial experiment. See, Braganza?
These Alien's out here in the desert
reservation are sick. They have hit
something in our culture that is as
psychologically indigestible to them as
. . . well, whatever they have that
sticks in our mental gullet and causes
ulcers among us. They’ve been put
into a kind of isolation in our desert
areas until the problem can be licked.”

“Something that’s’ as indigestible
psychologically — What could it be,

FIREWATER.

Hebster?”

The businessman shrugged irritably.
“I don’t know. And I don’t want to
know. Perhaps it’s just that they can’t
let go of a problem until they’ve solved
it — and they can’t solve the problems
of mankind’s activity because of man-
kind’s inherent and basic differences.
Simply because we can’t understand
them, we had no right to assume that
they could and did understand us.”
“That wasn’t all, Hebster. As the
comedians put it — everything we can
do, they can do better.”

“Then why did they keep sending
Primeys in to ask for those weird
gadgets and impossible gimcracks?”
“They could duplicate anything we
made.”

“Well, maybe that is it,” Hebster
suggested. “They could duplicate it,
but could they design it? They show
every sign of being a race of creatures
who never had to make very much for
themselves; perhaps they evolved
fairly early into animals with direct
control over matter, thus never having
had to go through the various stages of
artifact design. This, in our terms, is
a tremendous advantage; but it inev-
itably would have concurrent disad-
vantages. Among other things, it
would mean a minimum of art forms
and a lack of basic engineering knowl-
edge of the artifact itself if not of the
directly activated and altered ma-
terial. The fact is I was right, as I
found out later.

For example. Music is not a function

53

of theoretical harmonics, of complete
scores in the head of a conductor or
composer — these come later, much
later. Music is first and foremost a
function of the particular instrument,
the reed pipe, the skin drum, the
human throat — it is a function of
tangibles which a race operating upon
electrons, positrons and mesons would
never encounter in the course of its
construction. As soon as I had that, I
had the other flaw in the analogy — the
assumption itself.”

“You mean the assumption that we
are necessarily inferior to the Aliens?”

“Right, Braganza. They can do a
lot that we can’t do, but vice very
much indeed versa. How many special
racial talents we possess that they
don’t is a matter of pure conjecture —
and may continue to be for a good long
time. Let the theoretical boys worry
that one a century from now, just so
they stay away from it at present.”

Braganza fingered a button on his
green jerkin and stared over Hebster’s
head. “No more scientific investiga-
tion of them, eh? ”

“Well, we can’t right now and we
have to face up that mildly unpleasant
situation. The consolation is that they
have to do the same. Don’t you see?
It’s not a basic inadequacy. We don’t
have enough facts and can’t get
enough at the moment through normal
channels of scientific observation be-
cause of the implicit psychological
dangers to both races. Science, my

54

forward-looking friend, is a complex of
interlocking theories, all derived from
observation.

“Remember, long before you had
any science of navigation you had
coast-hugging and river-hopping trad-
ers who knew how the various currents
affected their leaky little vessels, who
had learned things about the relative
dependability of the moon and the
stars — without any interest at all in
integrating these scraps of knowledge
into broader theories. Not until you
have a sufficiently large body of these
scraps, and are able to distinguish the
preconceptions from the the actual ob-
servations, can you proceed to organ-
ize a science of navigation without
running the grave risk of drowning
while you conduct your definitive ex-
periments.

“A trader isn’t interested in the-
ories. He’s interested only in selling
something that glitters for something
that glitters even more. In the process,
painlessly and imperceptibly, lie picks
up bits of knowledge which gradually
reduce the area of unfamiliarity. Until
one day there are enough bits of
knowledge on which to base a sort of
preliminary understanding, a working
hypothesis. And then, some Kleim-
bocher of the future, operating in an
area no longer subject to the sudden
and unexplainable mental disaster,
can construct meticulous and exact
laws out of the more obviously valid
hypotheses.” '

“I might have known it would be

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-PICTION

something like this, if you came back
with it, Hebster! So their theorists and
our theorists had better move out and
the traders move in. Only how do we
contact their traders — if they have
any such animals?”

The corporation president sprang
out of bed and began dressing. “They
have them. Not a Board of Director
type perhaps — but a business-minded
Alien. As soon as I realized that the
dots-in-bottles were acting, relative to
their balanced scientific colleagues,
very like our own high IQ Primeys,
I knew I needed help. I needed some-
one I could tell about it, someone on
their side who had as great a stake in
an operating solution as I did. There
had to be an Alien in the picture some-
where who was concerned with profit
and loss statements, with how much
of a return you get out of a given in-
vestment of time, personnel, materiel
and energy. I figured with him I could
talk — business. The simple approach:
What have you got that we want and
how little of what we have will you
take for it. No attempts to understand
completely incompatible philosophies.
There had to be that kind of character
somewhere in the expedition. So I shut
my eyes and let out what I fondly
hoped was a telepathic yip channeled
to him. I was successful.

“Of course, I might not have been
successful if he hadn’t been searching
desperately for just that sort of yip.
He came buzzing up in a rousing
United States Cavalry-routs-the-red-

FIREWATER

skins type of rescue, stuffed my drip-
ping psyche back into my subconscious
and hauled me up into some sort of
never-never-ship. I’ve been in this
interstellar version of Mohammed’s
coffin, suspended between Heaven and
Earth, for three days, while he al-
ternately bargained with me and con-
sulted the home office about develop-
ments.

“We dickered the way I do with
Primeys — by running down a list of
what each of us could offer and com-
paring it with what we wanted; each
of us trying to get a little more than
we gave to the other guy, in our own
terms, of course. Buying and selling
are intrinsically simple processes; I
don’t imagine our discussions were
very much different from those be-
tween a couple of Phoenician sailors
and the blue-painted Celtic inhabitants
of early Britain.”

“And this . . . this business-Alien
never suggested the possibility of
taking what they wanted — ”

“By force? No, Braganza, not once.
Might be they’re too civilized for such
shenanigans. Personally, I think the
big reason is that they don’t have any
idea of what it is they do want from us.
We represent a fantastic enigma to
them — a species which uses matter to
alter matter, producing objects which,
while intended for similar functions,
differ enormously from each other.
You might say that we ask the ques-
tion ‘how?’ about their activities; and
they want to know the ‘why?’ about

55

ours. Tlieir investigators have com-
pulsions even greater than ours. As I
understand it, the intelligent races
they’ve encountered up to this point
are all comprehensible to them since
they derive from parallel evolutionary
paths. Every time one of their re-
searchers get close to the answer of
why we wear various colored clothes
even in climates where clothing is
unnecessary, he slips over the edges
and splashes.

“ Of course, that’s why this opposite
number of mine was so worried. I don’t
know his exact status — he may be
anything from the bookkeeper to the
business-manager of the expedition —
but it’s his bottle-neck if the outfit
continues to be uneconomic. And I
gathered that not only has his occupa-
tion kind of barred him from doing the
investigation his unstable pals were
limping back from into the asylums
he’s constructed here in the deserts,
but those of them who’ve managed to
retain their sanity constantly exhibit a
healthy contempt for him. They feel,
you see, that their function is that of
the expedition. He’s strictly super-
cargo. Do you think it bothers them
one bit,” Hebster snorted, “that he
has a report to prepare, to show how

his expedition stood up in terms of a
balance sheet — ”

“Well, you did manage to communi-
cate on that point, at least,” Braganza
grinned. “Maybe traders using the
simple, earnestly chiseling approach
will be the answer. You’ve certainty
supplied us with more basic data
already than years of heavily sub-
sidized research. Hebster I want you
to go on the air with this story you
told me and show a couple of Primey
Aliens to the video public.”

“Uh-uh. You tell ’em. You can use
the prestige. I’ll think a message to my
Alien buddy along the private channel
he’s keeping open for me, and he’ll
send you a couple of human-happy
dots-in-bottles for the telecast. I’ve
got to whip back to New York and get
my entire outfit to work on a realty
encyclopedic job.”

“Encyclopedic?”

The executive pulled his belt tight
and reached for a tie. “ Well, what else
would you call the first, edition of the
Hebster. Interstellar Catalogue of all
Human Activity and Available Arti-
facts, prices available upon request
with the understanding that they are
subject to change without notice?”

THE END

56

ASTOUNDIN' G SCIENCE-FICTION

BRIDGE

BY JAMES BUSH

The Bridge was built from
nowhere, across hell itself, to no-
where, under conditions no living
thing could endure, at immense cost
— and the building of it, not the
Bridge, was the important thing!

Illustrated by Orban

i.

A screeching tornado was rocking
the Bridge when the alarm sounded;
it was making the whole structure
shudder and sway. This was normal,
and Robert Helmuth barely noticed

it. There was always a tornado shak-
ing the Bridge. The whole planet was
enswathed in tornadoes, and worse.

The scanner on the foreman’s board
had given 114 as the sector of the
trouble. That was at the northwestern
end of the Bridge, where it broke off,
leaving nothing but the raging clouds
of ammonia crystals and methane, and
a sheer drop, thirty miles to the in-
visible surface. There were no ultra-
phone “eyes” at that end which gave
a general view of the area — in so far as
any general view was possible — be-
cause both ends of the Bridge were
incomplete.

With a sigh Helmuth put the beetle
into motion. The little car, as flat-
bottomed and thin through as a bed-
bug, got slowly under way on its ball-
bearing races, guided and held firmly
to the surface of the Bridge by ten

B RIDGE

57

close-set flanged rails. Even so, the
hydrogen gales made a terrific siren-
like shrieking between the edge of the
vehicle and the deck, and the impact
of the falling drops of ammonia upon
the curved roof was as heavy and
deafening as a rain of cannon balls.
As a matter of fact, they weighed al-
most as much as cannon balls here,
though they were not much bigger
than ordinary raindrops. Every so
often, too, there was a blast, accom-
panied by a dull orange glare, which
- made the car, the deck, and the
Bridge itself buck savagely.

These blasts were below, however,
on the surface. While they shook the
structure of the Bridge heavily, they
almost never interfered with its func-
tioning, and could not, in the very
nature of things, do Helmuth any
harm.

Had any real damage ever been
done, it would never have been re-
paired. There was no one on Jupiter
to repair it.

The Bridge, actually, was building
itself. Massive, alone, and lifeless, it
grew in the black deeps of Jupiter.

The Bridge had been well-planned.
From Helmuth’s point of view almost
nothing could be seen of it, for the
beetle tracks ran down the center of
the deck, and in the darkness and per-
petual storm even ultrawave-assistecl
vision could not penetrate more than
a few hundred yards at the most. The
width of the Bridge was eleven miles;
its height, thirty miles; its length,

58

deliberately unspecified in the plans,
fifty-four miles at the moment— a
squat, colossal structure, built with
engineering principles, methods, ma-
terials and tools never touched be-
fore —

For the very good reason that they
would have been impossible anywhere
else. Most of the Bridge, for instance,
was made of ice: a marvelous struc-
tural material under a pressure of a
million atmospheres, at a tempera-
ture of — 94°C. Under such conditions,
the best structural steel is a friable,
talclike powder, and aluminum be-
comes a peculiar, transparent sub-
stance that splits at a tap.

Back home, Helmuth remembered,
there had been talk of starting an-
other Bridge on Saturn, and perhaps,
still later, on Uranus, too. But that
had been politicians’ talk. The Bridge
was almost five thousand miles below
the visible surface of Jupiter’s atmos-
phere, and its mechanisms were just
barely manageable. The bottom of
Saturn’s atmosphere had been sounded
at sixteen thousand eight hundred
seventy-eight miles, and the tempera-
ture there was below— 150°C. There
even pressure-ice would be immovable,
and could not be worked with any-
thing except itself. And as for Ura-
nus . . .

As far as Helmuth was concerned,
Jupiter was quite bad enough.

The beetle crept within sight of the
end of the Bridge and stopped auto-

ASTO UNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

matically. Helmuth set the vehicle’s
eyes for highest penetration, and ex-
amined the nearby beams.

The great bars were as close-set as
screening. They had to be, in order to
support even their own weight, let
alone the weight of the components
of the Bridge. The whole web-work
was flexing and fluctuating to the
harpist-fingered gale, but it had been
designed to do that. Helmuth could
never help being alarmed by the move-
ment, but habit assured him that he
had nothing to fear from it.

He took the automatics out of the
circuit and inched the beetle forward
manually. This was only Sector 113,
and the Bridge’s own Wheatstone-
bridge scanning system — there was no
electronic device anywhere on the
Bridge, since it was impossible to
maintain a vacuum on Jupiter — said
that the trouble was in Sector 114.
The boundary of Sector 114 was still
fully fifty feet away.

It was a bad sign. Helmuth scratched
nervously in his red beard. Evidently
there was really cause for alarm — real
alarm, not just the deep, grinding de-
pression which he always felt while
working on the Bridge. Any damage
serious enough to halt the beetle a
full sector short of the trouble area
was bound to be major.

It might even turn out to be the
disaster which he had felt lurking
ahead of him ever since he had -been
made foreman of the Bridge — that
disaster which the Bridge itself could

BRIDGE

not repair, sending man reeling home
from Jupiter in defeat.

The secondaries cut in and the
beetle stopped again. Grimly, Hel-
muth opened the switch and sent the
beetle creeping across the invisible
danger line. Almost at once, the car
tilted just perceptibly to the left, and
the screaming of the . winds between
its edges and the deck shot up the
scale, sirening in and out of the souncl-
less-dogwhistle range with an eeriness
that set Helmuth’s teeth on edge. The
beetle itself fluttered and chattered
like an alarm-clock hammer between
the surface of the desk and the flanges
of the tracks.

Ahead there was still nothing to be
seen but the horizontal driving of the
clouds and the hail, roaring along the
length of the Bridge, out of the black-
ness into the beetle’s fanlights, and
onward into blackness again toward
the horizon no eye would ever see.

Thirty miles below, the fusillade of
hydrogen explosions continued. Evi-
dently something really wild was going
on on the surface. Helmuth could not
remember having heard so much ac-
tivity in years.

There was a flat, especially heavy
crash, and a long line of fuming orange
fire came pouring down the seething
atmosphere into the depths, feather-
ing horizontally like the mane of a
Lipizzan horse, directly in front of
Helmuth. Instinctively, he winced
and drew back from the board, al-
though that stream of flame actually

59

was only a little less cold than the
rest of the streaming gases, far too
cold to injure the Bridge.

In the momentary glare, however,
he saw something — an upward twist-
ing of shadows, patterned but obvi-
ously unfinished, fluttering in sil-
houette against the hydrogen cata-
ract’s lurid light.

The end of the Bridge.

Wrecked.

Helmuth grunted involuntarily and
backed the beetle away. The flare
dimmed; the light poured down the
sky and fell away into the raging sea
below. The scanner clucked with satis-
faction as the beetle recrossed the line
into Zone 113.

He turned the body of the vehicle
180°, presenting its back to the dying
torrent. There was nothing further
that he could do at the moment on the
Bridge. He scanned his control board
— a ghost image of which was cast
across the scene on the Bridge — for
the blue button marked Garage,
punched it savagely, and tore off his
helmet.

Obediently, the Bridge vanished.

II.

Dillon was looking at him.

“Well?” the civil engineer said.
“What’s the matter, Bob? Is it
bad—?”

Helmuth did not reply for a mo-
. ment. The abrupt transition from the
storm-ravaged deck of the Bridge to

60

the quiet, placid air of the control
shack on Jupiter V was always a shock.
He had never been able to anticipate
it, let alone become accustomed to it;
it was worse each time, not better.

He put the helmet down carefully
in front of him and got up, moving
carefully upon shaky legs; feeling im-
plicit in his own body the enormous
pressures and weights his guiding in-
telligence had just quitted. The fact
that the gravity on the foreman’s
deck was as weak as that of most of
the habitable asteroids only made the
contrast greater, and his need for
caution in walking more extreme.

He went to the big porthole and
looked out. The unworn, tumbled,
monotonous surface of airless Jupiter
V looked almost homey after the
perpetual holocaust of Jupiter itself.
But there was an overpowering re-
minder of that holocaust — for through
the thick quartz the face of the giant
planet stared at him, across only one
hundred twelve thousand six hundred
miles: a sphere-section occupying al-
most all of the sky except the near
horizon. It was crawling with color,
striped and blotched with the eternal,
frigid, poisonous storming of its at-
mosphere, spotted with the deep
planet-sized shadows of farther moons.

Somewhere down there, six thou-
sand miles below the clouds that
boiled in his face, was the Bridge. The
Bridge was thirty miles high and
eleven miles wide and fifty-four miles
long — but it was only a sliver, an in-

ASTOTTNOING SCIENCE-FICTION

tricate and fragile arrangement of ice-
crystals beneath the bulging, racing
tornadoes.

On Earth, even in the West, the
Bridge would have been the mightiest
engineering achievement of all history,
could the Earth have borne its weight
at all. But oil Jupiter, the Bridge was
as precarious and perishable as a
snowflake.

“Bob?” Dillon’s voice asked. “You
seem more upset than usual. Is it
serious?” Helmuth turned. His su-
perior’s worn young face, lantern-
jawed and crowned by black hair al-
ready beginning to gray at the tem-
ples, was alight both with love for the
Bridge and the consuming ardor of
the responsibility he had to bear. As
always, it touched Helmuth, and re-
minded him that the implacable uni-
verse had, after all, provided one warm
corner in which human beings might
huddle together.

“Serious enough,” he said, forming
l he words with difficulty against the
frozen inarticulateness Jupiter forced
upon him. “But not fatal, as far as I
could see. There’s a lot of hydrogen
vulcanism on the surface, especially
at the northwest end, and it looks like
(here must have been a big blast under
the cliffs. I saw what looked like the
last of a series of fireballs.”

Dillon’s face relaxed while Helmuth
was talking, slowly, line by engraved
line. “Oh. Just a flying chunk, then.”

“I’m almost sure that’s what it
was. The cross-drafts are heavy now.

BRIDGE

The Spot and the STD are due to
pass each other some time next week,
aren’t they? I haven’t checked, but I
can feel the difference in the storms.”

“So the chunk got picked up and
thrown through the end of the Bridge.
A big piece?”

Helmuth shrugged. “That end is all
twisted away to the left, and the
deck is burst to flinders. The scaffold-
ing is all gone, too, of course. A pretty
big piece, all right, Charity — two
miles through at a minimum.”

Dillon sighed. He, too, went to the
window, and looked out. Helmuth did
not need to be a mind reader to know
what he was looking at. Out there,
across the stony waste of Jupiter V
plus one hundred twelve thousand six
hundred miles of space, the South
Tropical Disturbance was streaming
toward the great Red Spot, and would
soon overtake it. When the whirling
funnel of the STD — more than big
enough to suck three Earths into deep-
freeze-passed the planetary island
of sodium-tainted ice which was the
Red Spot, the Spot would follow it for
a few thousand miles, at the same time
rising closer to the surface of the
atmosphere.

Then the Spot would sink again,
drifting back toward the incredible
jet of stress-fluid which kept it in be-
ing — a jet fed by no one knew what
forces at Jupiter’s hot, rocky, twenty-
two thousand mile core, under sixteen
thousand miles of eternal ice. During
the entire passage, the storms all over

61

Jupiter became especially violent; and right to needle me for something I
the Bridge had been forced to locate can’t help,” he said, his voice even
in anything but the calmest spot on lower than Dillon’s. “I work on
the planet, thanks to the uneven dis- Jupiter four hours a day— not ac-
tribution of the few permanent land- tually, because we can’t keep a man
masses alive for more than a split second down

Helmuth watched Dillon with a there— but my eyes and my ears and
certain compassion, tempered with my mind are there, on the Bridge, four
mild envy. Charity Dillon’s unfor- hours a day. Jupiter is not a nice
tunate given name betrayed him as place. I don’t like it. I won’t pretend .
the song of a hangover, the only male I do.

child of a Witness family which dated “Spending four hours a day in an
back to the great Witness Revival of environment like that over a period
2003. He was one of the hundreds of of years— well, the human mind in-
government-drafted experts who had stinctively tries to adapt, even to the
planned the Bridge, and he was as unthinkable. Sometimes I wonder how
obsessed by the Bridge as Helmuth I’ll behave when I’m put back in
was — but for different reasons. Chicago again. Sometimes I can’t re-

member anything about Chicago ex-
Helmuth moved back to the port, cept vague generalities, sometimes I
dropping his hand gently upon Dil- can’t even believe there is such a place
Ion’s shoulder. Together they looked as Earth— how could there be, when
at the screaming straw yellows, brick the rest, of the universe is like Jupiter,
reds, pinks, oranges, browns, even or worse?”

blues and greens that Jupiter threw “I know,” Dillon said. “I’ve tried
across the ruined stone of its innermost several times to show you that isn’t a
satellite. On Jupiter V, even the very reasonable frame of mind.”
shadows had color. !< I know it isn t. But I can t help

Dillon did not move. He said at how I feel. No, I don’t think the
last: “Are you pleased, Bob?” Bridge will last. It can t last; it s all

“Pleased?” Helmuth said in as- wrong. But I don’t want to see it go.
tonishment. “No. It scares me white; I’ve just got sense enough to know
you know that. I’m just glad that the that one of these days Jupiter is
whole Bridge didn’t go.” going to, sweep it away.”

“You’re quite sure?” Dillon said He wiped an open palm across the
quietly. control boards, snapping all the tog-

Helmuth took his hand from Dil- gles “Off” with a sound like the fall
Ion’s shoulder and returned to his of a double-handful of marbles on a
nmt at the central desk. “You’ve no pane of glass. “Like that, Charity!

() ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION \|

A nd I work four hours a day, every Right here on Jupiter V, in no danger,
day, on the Bridge. One of these days, in no danger at all. The Bridge is
Jupiter is going to destroy the Bridge, one hundred twelve thousand six
1 1 ’ll go flying away in little flinders, hundred miles away from here. But
into the storms. My mind will be when the day comes that the Bridge
I here, supervising some puny job, is swept away —
and my mind will go flying away along “ Charity, sometimes I imagine you
with my mechanical eyes and ears — ferrying my body back to the cozy
si ill trying to adapt to the unthink- nook it came from, while my soul goes
able, tumbling away into the winds tumbling and tumbling through mil-
and the flames and the rains and the lions of cubic miles of poison. All
darkness and the pressure and the

cold.”

“Bob, you’re deliberately running
away with yourself. Cut it out. Cut it
out, I say!”

Helmuth shrugged, putting a trem-
bling hand on the edge of the board to
steady himself. “All right. I’m all
right, Charity. I’m here, aren’t I?

•</oo<l0i IU'
•mih Jj&fdcsu rtumfiooD

a vi> . X'no f/nifrU

col ft* ^‘Cirl/ o\fr / ^

as mocvAfi/tf U

BRIDGE

63

right, Charity, I’ll be good. I won’t
think about it out loud; but you can’t
expect me to forget it. It’s on my mind ;
I can’t help it, and you should know
that.”

“I do,” Dillon said, with a kind of
eagerness. “I do, Bob. I’m only trying
to help, to make you see the problem
as it is. The Bridge isn’t really that
awful, it isn’t worth a single night-
mare.”

“Oh, it isn’t the Bridge that makes
me yell out when I’m sleeping,” Hel-
muth said, smiling bitterly. “ I’m not
that ridden by it yet. It’s while I’m
awake that I’m afraid the Bridge will
be swept away. What I sleep with is a
fear of myself.”

“That’s a sane fear. You’re as sane
as any of us,” Dillon insisted, fiercely
solemn. “Look, Bob. The Bridge isn’t
a monster. It’s a way we’ve developed
for studying the behavior of materials
under specific conditions of tempera-
ture, pressure, and gravity. Jupiter
isn’t Hell, either; it’s a set of condi-
tions. The Bridge is the laboratory
we set up to work with those condi-
tions.”

“It isn’t going anywhere. It’s a
bridge to no place.”

“There aren’t many places on Jupi-
ter,” Dilion said, missing Helmuth’s
meaning entirely. “We put the Bridge
on an island in the local sea because
we needed solid ice we could sink the
caissons in. Otherwise, it wouldn’t
have mattered where we put it. We
could have floated it on the sea itself,

64

if we hadn’t wanted to fix it in order
to measure storm velocities and such
things.”

“I know that,” Helmuth said.

“But Bob, you don’t show any signs
of understanding it. Why, for instance,
should the Bridge go any place? It
isn’t even, properly speaking, a bridge
at all. We only call it that because
we used some bridge engineering prin-
ciples in building it. Actually, it’s
much more like a traveling crane — an
extremely heavy-duty overhead rail
line. It isn’t going anywhere because it
hasn’t any place interesting to go,
that’s all. We’re extending it to cover
as much territory as possible, and to
increase its stability, not to span the
distance between places. There’s no
point to reproaching it because it
doesn’t span a real gap — between, say,
Dover and Calais. It’s a bridge to
knowledge, ' and that’s far more im-
portant. Why can’t you see that?”

“I can see that; that’s what I was
talking about,” Helmuth said, trying
to control his impatience. “I have as
much common sense as the average
child. What I was trying' to point out
is that meeting colossalness with co-
lossalness — out here — is a mug’s game.
It’s a game Jupiter will always win,
without the slightest effort. What if
the engineers who built the Dover-
Calais bridge had been limited to
broomstraws for their structural mem-
bers? They could have got the bridge
up somehow, sure, and made it strong
enough to carry light traffic on a fair

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE -FICTION

day. But what would you have had
left of it after the first winter storm
came down the Channel from the
North Sea? The whole approach is
idiotic!”

“All right,” Dillon said reasonably.
“You have a point. Now you’re being
reasonable. What better approach
have you to suggest? Should we
abandon Jupiter entirely because it’s
loo big for us?”

“No,” Helmuth said. “Or maybe,
yes. I don’t know. I don’t have any
easy answer. I just know that this
one is no answer at all — it’s just a
cumbersome evasion.”

Dillon smiled. “You’re depressed,
and no wonder. Sleep it off, Bob, if
you can — you might even come up
with that answer. In the meantime —
well, when you stop to think about it,
the surface of Jupiter isn’t any more
hostile, inherently, than the surface
of Jupiter V, except in degree. If you
stepped out of this building naked,
you’d die just as fast as you would
on Jupiter. Try to look at it that
way.”

Helmuth, looking forward into an-
other night of dreams, said: “That’s
the way I look at it now.”

III.

There were three yellow “Critical”
signals lit on the long gang board when
Helmuth passed through the gang
deck on the way back to duty. All
of them, as usual, were concentrated

BRIDGE

on Panel 9, where Eva Chavez worked.

Eva, despite her Latin name — such
once-valid tickets no longer meant
anything among Earth’s uniformly
mixed-race population — was a big
girl, vaguely blond, who cherished
a passion for the Bridge. Unfortu-
nately, she was apt to become en-
thralled by the sheer Cosmicness of it
all, precisely at the moments when
cold analysis and split-second deci-
sions were most crucial.

Helmuth reached over her shoulder,
cut her out of the circuit except as an
observer, and donned the co-operator’s
helmet. The incomplete new shoals
caisson sprang into being around him.
Breakers of boiling hydrogen seethed
seven hundred feet up along its slanted
sides — breakers that never subsided,
but simply were torn away into flying
spray.

There was a spot of dull orange
near the top of the north face of the
caisson, crawling slowly toward the
pediment of the nearest truss. Ca-
talysis —

Or cancer, as Helmuth could not
help but think of it. On this bitter,
violent monster of a planet, even the
tiny specks of calcium carbide were
deadly. At these wind velocities, such
specks imbedded themselves in every-
thing; and at fifteen million pounds
per square inch, pressure ice catalyzed
by sodium took up ammonia and car-
bon dioxide, building proteinlike com-
pounds in a rapid, deadly chain of
decay:

65

H-NCHCO-HNCHCO-HNCHCO-BN. . . .

I I I

CaO Ca Ca

I !

HNCHCO-HNCHCO-HNCHCO'HN.
I I I

CaO Ca Ca

I 1

HNCHCOHNCHCOHN.

For a second, Helmuth watched it
grow. It was, after all, one of the
incredible possibilities the Bridge had
been built to study. On Earth, such a
compound, had it occurred at all,
might have grown porous, bony, and
quite strong. Here, under nearly eight
times the gravity, the molecules were
forced to assemble in strict aliphatic
order, but in cross section their ar-
rangement was hexagonal, as if the
stuff would become an aromatic com-
pound if it only could. Even here it
was moderately strong in cross section
— but along the long axis it smeared
like graphite, the calcium atoms read-
ily surrendering their valence hold on
one carbon atom to grab hopefully
for the next one in line —

No stuff to hold up the piers of hu-
manity’s greatest engineering project.
Perhaps it was suitable for the ribs of
some Jovian jellyfish, but in a Bridge-
caisson, it was cancer.

There was a scraper mechanism
working on the edge of the lesion,
flaking away the shearing aminos and
laying down new ice. In the meantime,
the decay of the caisson-face was work-
ing deeper. The scraper could not pos-
sibly get at the core of the trouble —
which was not the calcium carbide
dust, with which the atmosphere was
charged beyond redemption, but was

66

instead one imbedded sodium speck
which was taking no part in the reac-
tion — fast enough to extirpate it. It
could barely keep pace with the sur-
face spread of the disease.

And laying new ice over the surface
of the wound was worthless. At this
rate, the whole caisson would slough
away and melt like butter, within an
hour, under the weight of the Bridge |
above it.

Helmuth sent the futile scraper
aloft. Drill for it? No — too deep al-
ready, and location unknown.

Quickly he called two borers up
from the shoals below, where constant
blasting was taking the foundation
of the caisson deeper and deeper into
Jupiter’s dubious “soil.” He drove
both blind, fire-snouted machines
down into the lesion.

The bottom of that sore turned out
to be forty-five meters within the im-
mense block. Helmuth pushed the red
button all the same.

The borers blew up, with a heavy,
quite invisible blast, as they had been
designed to do. A pit appeared on the
face of the caisson.

The nearest truss bent upward in
the wind. It fluttered for a moment,
trying to resist. It bent farther.

Deprived of its major attachment,
it tore free suddenly, and went whirl-
ing away into the blackness. A sud-
den flash of lightning picked it out for
a moment, and Helmuth saw it dwin-
dling like a bat with torn wings being

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

borne away by a cyclone.

The scraper scuttled down into the
pit and began to fill it with ice from
the bottom. Helmuth ordered down a
new truss and a squad of scaffolders.
Damage of this order took time to
repair. He watched the tornado tear-
ing ragged chunks from the edges of
the pit - until he was sure that the
catalysis had stopped. Then, suddenly,
prematurely, dismally tired, he took
off the helmet.

He was astounded by the white
fury that masked Eva’s big-boned,
mildly pretty face.

“You’ll blow the Bridge up yet,
won’t you?” she said, evenly, without
preamble. “Any pretext will do!”

Baffled, Helmuth turned his head
helplessly away; but that was no
better. The suffused face of Jupiter
peered swollenly through the picture-
port, just as it did on the foreman’s
desk.

He and Eva and Charity and the
gang and the whole of satellite V were
falling forward toward Jupiter; their
uneventful, cooped-up lives on Jupiter
V were utterly unreal compared to
( lie four hours of each changeless day
spent on Jupiter’s ever-changing sur-
face. Every new day brought their
minds, like ships out of control, closer
and closer to that gaudy inferno.

There was no other way for a man —
or a woman — on Jupiter V to look at
(he giant planet. It was simple ex-
perience, shared by all of them, that
planets do not occupy four-fifths of

BRIDGE

the whole sky, unless the observer is
himself up there in that planet’s sky,
falling, falling faster and faster —

“I have no intention,” he said
tiredly, “of blowing up the Bridge. I
wish you could get it through your
head that I want the Bridge to stay
up — even though I’m not starry-eyed
to the point of incompetence about
the project. Did you think that rotten
spot was going to go away by itself
when you’d painted it over? Didn’t
you know that — ”

Several helmeted, masked heads
nearby turned blindly toward the
sound of his voice. Helmuth shut up.
Any distracting conversation or ac-
tivity was taboo, down here in the
gang room. He motioned Eva back to
duty.

The girl donned her helmet obedi-
ently enough, but it was plain from the
way her normally full lips were thinned
that she thought Helmuth had. ended
the argument only in order to have
the last word.

Helmuth strode to the thick pillar
which ran down the central axis of
the shack, and mounted the spiraling
cleats toward his own foreman’s cu-
bicle. Already he felt in anticipation
the weight of the helmet upon his own
head.

Charity Dillon, however, was al-
ready wearing the helmet; he was sit-
ting in Helmuth’s chair.

Charity was characteristically obliv-
ious of Helmuth’s entrance. The

67

Bridge operator must learn to ignore,
to be utterly unconscious of anything
happening around his body except
the inhuman sounds of signals; must
learn to heed only those senses which
report something going on thousands
of miles away.

Helmuth knew better than to inter-
rupt him. Instead, he watched Dil-
lon’s white, bladelike fingers roving
with blind sureness over the controls.

Dillon, evidently, was making a
complete tour of the Bridge — not only
from end to end, but up and down,
too. The tally board showed that he
had already activated nearly two-
thirds of the ultraphone eyes. That
meant that he had been up all night
at the job; had begun it immediately
after last talking to Helmuth.

Why?

With a thrill of unfocused appre-
hension, Helmuth looked at the fore-
man’s jack, which allowed the oper-
ator here in the cubicle to communi-
cate with the gang when necessary,
and which kept him aware of anything
said or done at gang boards.

It was plugged in.

Dillon sighed suddenly, took the
helmet off, and turned.

“Hello, Bob,” he said. “Funny
about this job. You can’t see, you
can’t hear, but when somebody’s
watching you, you feel a sort of pres-
sure on the back of your neck. ESP,
maybe. Ever felt it?”

“Pretty often, lately. Why the
grand tour, Charity?”

68

“There’s to be an inspection,” Dil-
lon said. His eyes met Helmuth’s.
They were frank and transparent. “A
mob of Western officials, coming to
see that their eight billion dollars isn’t
being wasted. Naturally, I’m a little
anxious to see that they find every-
thing in order.”

“I see,” Helmuth said. “First time
in five years, isn’t it?”

“Just about. What was that dust-
up down below just now? Somebody —
you, I’m sure, from the drastic handi-
work involved — bailed Eva out of a
mess, and then I heard her talk about
your wanting to blow up the Bridge.
I checked the area when I heard the
fracas start, and it did seem as if she
had let things go rather far, but —
What was it all about? ”

Dillon ordinarily hadn’t the guile
for cat-and-mouse games, and he had
never looked less guileful now. Hel-
muth said carefully, “Eva was upset,
I suppose. On the subject of Jupiter
we’re all of us cracked by now, in our
different ways . The way she was deal-
ing with the catalysis didn’t look to
me to be suitable — a difference of
opinion, resolved in my favor because
I had the authority, Eva didn’t.
That’s all.”

“Kind of an expensive difference,
Bob. I’m not niggling by nature, you
know that. But an incident like that
while the commission is here —

“The point is,” Helmuth said, “are
we to spend an extra ten thousand,
or whatever it costs to replace a truss

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

and reinforce a caisson, or are we to
lose the whole caisson — and as much
as a third of the whole Bridge along
with it?”

“Yes, you’re right there, of course.
That could be explained, even to a
pack of senators. But — it would be
difficult to have to explain it very
often. Well, the board’s yours, Bob:
You could continue my spot-check,
if you’ve time.”

Dillon got up. Then he added sud-
denly, as if it were forced out of him:

“Bob, I’m trying to understand
your state -of mind. From what Eva
said, I gather that you’ve made it
fairly public. I ... I don’t think
it’s a good idea to infect your fellow
workers with your own pessimism.
It leads to sloppy work. I know that
regardless of your own feelings you
won’t countenance sloppy work, but
one foreman can do only so much.
And you’re making extra work for
yourself — not for me, but for yourself
— by being opeidy gloomy about the
Bridge.

“ You’re the best man on the Bridge,
Bob, for all your grousing about the
job, and your assorted misgivings.
I’d hate to see you replaced.”

“A threat, Charity?” Helmuth said
softly.

“No. I wouldn’t replace you unless
you actually went nuts, and I firmly
believe that your fears in that respect
are groundless. It’s a commonplace
that only sane men suspect their own

BRIDGE

sanity, isn’t it? ”

“It’s a common misconception.
Most psychopathic obsessions begin
with a mild worry.”

Dillon made as if to brush that sub-
ject away. “Anyhow, I’m not threat-
ening; I’d fight to keep you here. But
my say-so only covers Jupiter V;
-there are people higher up on Gany-
mede, and people higher yet back in
Washington — and in this inspecting
commission.

“Why don’t you try to look on the
bright side for a change? Obviously
the Bridge isn’t ever going to inspire
you. But you might at least try think-
ing about all those dollars piling up
in your account every hour you’re
on this job, and about the bridges and
ships and who knows what-all that
you’ll be building, at any fee you ask,
when you get back down to Earth.
All under the magic words, ‘One of the
men who built the Bridge on Jupi-
ter!”’

Charity was bright red with em-
barrassment and enthusiasm. Hel-
muth smiled.

“I’ll try to bear it in mind, Char-
ity,” he said. “When is this gaggle of
senators due to arrive?”

“They’re on Ganymede now, tak-
ing a breather. They came directly
from Washington without any routing.

I suppose they’ll make a stop at Cal-
listo before they come here. They’ve
something new on their ship, I’m told,
that lets them flit about more freely
than the usual uphill transport can.”

69

An icy lizard suddenly was nesting
in Helmuth’s stomach, coiling and
coiling but never settling itself.. The
room blurred. The persistent night-
mare was suddenly almost upon him —
already.

“Something . . . new? ” he echoed,
his voice as flat and noncommittal as
he could make it. “ Do you know what
it is?”

“Well, yes. But I think I’d better
keep quiet about it until — ”

“Charity, nobody on this deserted
rock-heap could possibly be a Soviet
spy. The whole habit of ‘security’ is
idiotic out here. Tell me now and
save me the trouble of dealing with
senators; or tell me at least that you

70

know I know. They have antigravity I
Isn’t that it?”

One word from Dillon, and the
nightmare would be real.

“Yes,” DilIon..said. “How did you
know? Of course, it couldn’t be a com-
plete gravity screen by any means.
But it seems to be a good long step
toward it. We’ve waited a long time
to see that dream come true — But
you’re the last man in the world to
take pride in the achievement, so
there’s no sense exulting about it to
you. I’ll let you know when I get a
definite arrival date. In the meantime,
will you think about what I said be-
fore?”

“Yes, I will.” Helmuth took the

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-DICTION

seat before the board.

“Good. With you, I have to be
grateful for small victories. Good trick,
Bob.”

“Good trick, Charity.”

IV.

Instead of sleeping — for now he
knew that he was really afraid — he
sat up in the reading chair in his cabin.
The illuminated microfilmed pages
of a book flipped by across the surface
of the wall opposite him, timed pre-
cisely to the reading rate most com-
fortable for him, and he had several
weeks’ worry-conserved alcohol and
smoke rations for ready consumption.

But Helmuth let his mix go flat,
and did not notice the book, which
had turned itself on, at the page where
he had abandoned it last, when he
had fitted himself into the chair.
Instead, he listened to the radio.

There was always a great deal of
ham radio activity in the Jovian sys-
tem. The conditions were good for it,
since there was plenty of power avail-
able, few impeding atmosphere layers
and those thin, no Heaviside layers,
and few official and no commercial
channels with which the hams could
interfere.

And there were plenty of people scat-
tered about the satellites who needed
the sound of a voice.

“ . . . anybody know whether the
senators are coming here? Doc Barth
put in a report a while back on a fossil

BRIDGE

plant he found here, at least he thinks
it was a plant. Maybe they’d like a
look at it.”

“They’re supposed to hit the Bridge
team next.” A strong voice, and the
impression of a strong transmitter
wavering in and out; that would be
Sweeney, on Ganymede. “Sorry to
throw the wet blanket, boys, but I
don’t think the senators are interested
in our rock-balls for their own lumpy
selves. We could only hold them here
three days.”

Helmuth thought grayly: Then

they’ve already left Callisto.

“Is that you, Sweeney? Where’s
the Bridge tonight?”

“Dillon’s on duty,” a very distant
transmitter said. “Try to raise Hel-
muth, Sweeney.”

“Helmuth, Helmuth, you gloomy
beetle-gooser! Come in, Helmuth!”

“Sure, Bob, come in and dampen
us.”

Sluggishly, Helmuth reached out to
take the mike, where it lay clipped to
one arm of the chair. But the door to
his room opened before he had com-
pleted the gesture.

Eva came in.

She said, “Bob, I want to tell you
something.”

“His voice is changing!” the voice
of the Callisto operator said. “Ask
him what he’s drinking, Sweeney!”

Helmuth cut the radio out. The
girl was freshly dressed — in so far as
anybody dressed in anything on Jupi-
ter V — and Helmuth wondered why

71

she was prowling the decks at this
hour, halfway between her sleep pe-
riod and her trick. Her hair was hazy
against the light from the corridor,
and she looked less mannish than
usual. She reminded him a little of the
way she had looked when they first
met.

“All right,” he said. “I owe you a
mix, I guess. Citric, sugar and the
other stuff is in the locker . . . you
know where it is. Shot-cans are there,
too.”

The girl shut the door and sat down
on the bunk, with a free litheness that
was almost grace, but with a deter-
mination which Helmuth knew meant
that she had just decided to do some-
thing silly for all the right reasons.

“I don’t need a drink,” she said.
“As a matter of fact, lately I’ve been
turning my lux-R’s back to the com-
mon pool. I suppose you did that for
me — by showing me what a mind
looked like that is hiding from itself.”

“Eve, stop sounding like a tract.
Obviously you’ve advanced to a
higher, more Jovian plane of existence,
but won’t you still need your metab-
olism? Or have you decided that vita-
mins are all-in-the-mind?”

“Now you’re being superior. Any-
how, alcohol isn’t a vitamin. And I
didn’t come to talk about that. I came
to tell you something I think you
ought to know.”

“Which is?”

She said, “Bob, I mean to have a

child here.”

A bark of laughter, part sheer hys-
teria and part exasperation, jackknifed
Helmuth into a sitting position. A red
arrow bloomed on the far wall, obedi-
ently marking the paragraph which,
supposedly, he had reached in his
reading, and the page vanished.

“Women!” he said, when he could
get his breath back. “Really, Evita,
you make me feel much better. No
environment can change a human be-
ing much, after all.”

“Why should it?” she said suspi-
ciously. “Idon’t see the joke. Shouldn’t
a woman want to have a child?”

“Of course she should,” he said,
settling back. The flipping pages be-
gan again. “It’s quite ordinary. All
women want to have children. Ail
women dream of the day they can
turn a child out to play in an airless
rock-garden, to pluck fossils and get
quaintly star-burned. How cozy to
tuck the little blue body back into its
corner that night, promptly at the
sound of the trick-change bell! Why,
it’s as. natural as Jupiter-light — as
Earthian as vacuum-frozen apple
pie.”

He turned his head casually away.
“As for me, though, Eva, I’d much
prefer that you take your ghostly little
pretext out of here.”

Eva surged to her feet in one furious
motion. Her fingers grasped him by
the beard and jerked his head pain-
fully around again.

“You reedy male platitude!” she

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

said, in a low grinding voice. “How
you could see almost the whole point
and make so little of it — Women, is
it? So you think I came creeping
in here, full of humbleness, to settle
our technical differences.”

He closed his hand on her wrist and
twisted it away. “What else?” he
demanded, trying to imagine how it
would feel to stay reasonable for five
minutes at a time with these Bridge-
robots. “None of us need bother with
games and excuses. We’re here, we’re
isolated, we were all chosen because,
among other things, we were judged
incapable of forming permanent emo-
tional attachments, and capable of
such alliances as we found attractive
without going unbalanced when the
attraction diminished and the alliance
came unstuck. None of us have to
pretend that our living arrangements
would keep us out of jail in Boston, or
that they have to involve any Earth-
normal excuses.”

She said nothing. After a while he
asked, gently, “Isn’t that so?”

“Of course it’s so. Also it has noth-
ing to do with the matter.”

“It doesn’t? How stupid do you
think I am? I don’t care whether or
not you’ve decided to have a child
here, if you really mean what yousay.”
She was trembling with rage. “ You
really don’t, too. The decision means
nothing to you.”

“Well, if I liked children, I’d be
sorry for the child. But as it happens,
I can’t stand children. In short, Eva,

BRIDGE

as far as I’m concerned you can have
as many as you want, and to me you’ll
still be the worst operator on the
Bridge.”

“I’ll bear that in mind,” she said.
At this moment she seemed to have
been cut from pressure-ice. “ I’ll leave
you something to charge your mind
with, too, Robert Helmuth. I’ll leave
you sprawled here under your precious
book . . . what is Madame Bovary
to you, anyhow, you unadventurous
turtle? ... to think about a man
who believes that children must al-
ways be born into warm cradles — a
man who thinks that men have to
huddle / on warm worlds, or they won’t
survive. A man with no ears, no eyes,
scarcely any head. A man in terror, a
man crying Mamma! Mamma! all the
stellar days and nights long!”

“1 Parlor diagnosis!”

“Parlor labeling! Good trick, Bob.
Draw your warm woolly blanket in
tight about your brains, or some
little sneeze of sense might creep in,
and impair your — efficiency!”

The door closed sharply after her.

A million pounds of fatigue crashed
down without warning on Helmuth’s
brain, and he fell back into the read-
ing chair with a gasp. The roots of his
beard ached, and Jupiters bloomed
and wavered away before his closed
eyes.

He struggled once, and fell asleep.

Instantly he was in the grip of the
dream.

72

73

It started, as always, with com-
monplaces, almost realistic enough to
be a documentary film-strip — except
for the appalling sense of pressure,
and the distorted emotional signif-
icance with which the least word, the
smallest movement was invested.

It was the sinking of the first caisson
of the Bridge. The actual event had
been bad enough. The job demanded
enough exactness of placement to
require that manned ships enter Jupi-
ter’s atmosphere itself: a squadron of
twenty of the most powerful ships
ever built, with the five million ton
asteroid, trimmed and shaped in
space, slung beneath them in an im-
mense cat’s cradle.

Four times that squadron had disap-
peared beneath the clouds ; four times
the tense voices of pilots and engineers
had muttered in Helmuth’s ears; four
times there were shouts and futile
orders and the snapping of cables and
someone screaming endlessly against
the eternal howl of the Jovian sky.

It had cost, altogether, nine ships
and two hundred and thirty-one men,
to get one of five laboriously shaped
asteroids planted in the shifting slush
that was Jupiter’s surface. Helmuth
had helped to supervise all five opera-
tions, counting the successful one,
from his desk on Jupiter V ; but in the
dream he was not in the control shack,
but instead on shipboard, in one of
the ships that was never to come
back —

Then, without transition, but with-

74

out any sense of discontinuity either,
he was on the Bridge itself. Not in
absentia, as the remote guiding in-
telligence of a beetle, but in person,
in an ovular, tanklike suit the details
of which would never come clear. The
high brass had discovered antigravity,
and had asked for volunteers to man
the Bridge. Helmuth had volunteered.

Looking back on it in the dream, he
did not understand why he had volun-
teered. It had simply seemed expected
of him, and he had not been able to
help it, even though he had known
what it would be like. He belonged on
the Bridge, though he hated it — he
had been doomed to go there, from
the first.

And there was . . . something
wrong . . . with the antigravity. The
high brass had asked for its volun-
teers before the scientific work had
been completed. The present anti-
gravity fields were weak, and there
was some basic flaw in the theory.
Generators broke down after only
short periods of use, burned out, un-
predictably, sometimes only moments
after testing up without a flaw — like
vacuum tubes in waking life.

That was what Helmuth’s set was
about to do. He crouched inside his
personal womb, above the boiling sea,
the clouds raging about him, lit by a
plume of hydrogen flame, and waited
to feel his weight suddenly become
eight times greater than normal. He
knew what would happen to him then.

It happened.

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

Helmuth greeted morning on Jupi-
ter V with his customary scream.

V.

The ship that landed as he was
going on duty did nothing to lighten
the load on his heart. In shape it was
not distinguishable from any of the
long-range cruisers which ran the legs
of the Moon-Mars-Belt-Ganymede
trip. But it grounded its huge bulk
with less visible expenditures of power
than one of the little intersatellary
boats.

That landing told Helmuth that his
dream, was well on its way to coming
true. If the high brass had had a real
antigravity, there would have been no
reason why. the main jets should have
been necessary at all. Obviously, what
had been discovered was some sort of
partial screen, which allowed a ship
to operate with far less jet. action than
was normal, but which still left it
subject to a sizable fraction of the
universal stress of space.

Nothing less than a complete and
completely controllable antigravity
would do on Jupiter.

He worked mechanically, noting
that Charity was not in evidence.
Probably he was conferring with the-
senators, receiving what would be for
him the glad news.

Helmuth realized suddenly that
there was nothing left for him to do
now but to cut and run.

There could certainly be no reason

BRIDGE

why he should have to re-enact the
entire dream, helplessly, event for
event, like an actor committed to a
play. He was awake now, in full con-
trol of his own senses, and still at least
partially sane. The man in the dream
had volunteered — but that man would
not be Robert Helmuth. Not any
longer.

While the senators were here, he
would turn in his resignation. Direct,
over Charity’s head.

“Wake up, Helmuth,” a voice from
the gang deck snapped suddenly. “If
it hadn’t been for me, you’d have run
yourself off the end of the Bridge.
You had all the automatic stops on
that beetle cut out.”

Helmuth reached guiltily and more
than a little too late for the controls.
Eva had already run his beetle back
beyond the danger line.

“Sorry,” he mumbled. “Thanks,.
Eva.”

“Don’t thank me. If you’d actually
been in it, I’d have let it go. Less read-
ing and more sleep is what I recom-
mend for you, Helmuth.”

“Keep your recommendations to
yourself,” he snapped.

The incident started a new and
even more disturbing chain of thought.
If he were to resign now, it would be
nearly a year before he could get back
to Chicago. Antigravity or no anti-
gravity, the senators’ ship would have
no room for unexpected extra passen-
gers. Shipping a man back home had to
be arranged far in advance. Space had

75

to be provided, and a cargo equivalent
of the weight and space requirements
lie would take Up on the return trip
had to be deadheaded out to Jupiter.

A year of living in the station on
Jupiter V without any function —
as a man whose drain on the station’s
supplies no longer could be justified
in terms of what he did. A year of
living under the eyes of Eva Chavez
and Charity Dillon and the other men
and women who still, remained Bridge
operators, men and women who would
not hesitate to let him know what they
thought of his quitting.

A year of living as a bystander in
the feverish excitement of direct, per-
sonal exploration of Jupiter. A year of
watching and hearing the inevitable
deaths — while he alone stood aloof,
privileged and useless. A year during
which Robert Helmuth would be-
come the most hated living entity in
the Jovian system.

And, when he got back to Chicago
and went looking for a job — for his
resignation from the Bridge gang
would automatically take him out of
government service — he would be
asked why he left the Bridge at the
moment when work on the Bridge was
just reaching its culmination.

He began to understand why the
man in the dream had volunteered.

When the trick-change bell rang,
he was still determined to resign, but
he had already concluded bitterly
that there were, after all, other kinds
of hells besides the one on Jupiter.

76

He was returning the board to
neutral as Charity came up the cleats.
Charity’s eyes were snapping like a
skyful of comets. Helmuth had known
that they would be.

“Senator Wagoner wants to speak
to you, if you’re not too tired, Bob,”
he said. “Go ahead; I’ll finish up
there.”

“He does?” Helmuth frowned. The
dream surged back upon him. No.
The}' would not rush him any faster
than he wanted to go. “ What about,
Charity? Am I suspected of unWestern
activities? I suppose you’ve told them
how I feel.”

“I have,” Dillon said, unruffled.
“But we’re agreed that you may not
feel the same way after you’ve talked
to Wagoner. He’s in the ship, of
course. I’ve put out a suit for you at
the lock.”

Charity put the helmet over his
head, effectively cutting himself off
from further conversation, or from
any further consciousness of Helmuth
at all.

Helmuth stood looking at him a
moment. Then, with a convulsive
shrug, he went down the cleats.

Three minutes later, he was plodding
in a spacesuit across the surface of
Jupiter V, with the vivid bulk of
Jupiter splashing his shoulders with
color.

A courteous Marine let him through
the ship’s air lock and deftly peeled
him out of the suit. Despite a grim

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

determination to be uninterested in
the new antigravity and any possible
consequence of it, he looked curiously
about as he was conducted up toward
the bow.

But the ship was like the ones that
had brought him from Chicago to
Jupiter V — it was like any spaceship:
there was nothing in it to see but
corridor walls and stairwells, until
you arrived at the cabin where you
were needed.

Senator Wagoner was a surprise.
He was a young man, no more than
sixty-five at most, not at all portly,
and he had the keenest pair of blue
eyes that Helmuth had ever seen. He
received Helmuth alone, in his own
cabin — a comfortable cabin as space-
ship accommodations go, but neither
roomy nor luxurious. He was hard to
match up with the stories Helmuth
had been hearing about the current
Senate, which had been involved in
scandal after scandal of more than
Roman proportions.

Helmuth looked around. “ I thought
there were several of you,” he said.

“There are, but I didn’t want to
give you the idea that you were facing
a panel,” Wagoner said, smiling. “I’ve
been forced to sit in on most of these
endless loyalty investigations back
home, but I can’t see any point in
exporting such religious ceremonies to
deep space. Do sit down, Mr. Hel-
muth. There are drinks coming. We
have a lot to talk about.”

Stiffly, Helmuth sat down.

BRIDGE

“Dillon tells me,” Wagoner said,
leaning back comfortably in his own
chair, “that your usefulness to the
Bridge is about at an end. In a way,
I’m sorry to hear that, for you’ve
been one of the best men we’ve had
on any of our planetary projects. But,
in another way, I’m glad. It makes
you available for something much
bigger, where we need you much
more.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I’ll explain in a moment. First,
I’d like to talk a little about the
Bridge. Please don’t feel that I’m
quizzing you, by the way. You’re at
perfect liberty to say that any given
question is none of my business, and
I’ll take no offense and hold no grudge.
Also, ‘I hereby disavow the authen-
ticity of any tape or other tapping of
which this statement may be a part.’
In short, our conversation is un-
official, highly so.”

“Thank you.”

“It’s to my interest; I’m hoping
that you’ll talk freely to me. Of course
my disavowal means nothing, since
such formal statements can always be
excised from a tape; but later on I’m
going to tell you some things you’re
not supposed to know, and you’ll
be able to judge by what I say then
that anything you say to me is priv-
ileged. O.K.?”

A steward came in silently with the
drinks, and left again. Helmuth tasted
his. As far as he could tell, it was

78

exactly like many he had mixed for
himself back in the control shack,
from standard space rations. The only
difference was that it was cold, which
Helmuth found startling, but not un-
pleasant after the first sip. He tried to
relax. “I’ll do my best,” he said.

“Good enough. Now: Dillon says
that you regard the Bridge as a
monster. I’ve examined your dossier
pretty closely, and I think perhaps
Dillon hasn’t quite the gist of your
meaning. I’d like to hear it straight
from you.”

“I don’t think the Bridge is a
monster,” Helmuth said slowly. “You
see, Charity is on the defensive. He
takes the Bridge to be conclusive
evidence that no possible set of ad-
verse conditions ever will Stop man
for long, and there I’m in agreement
with him. But he also thinks of it as
Progress, personified. He can’t admit
— you asked me to speak my mind,
senator — that the West is a decadent
and dying culture. All the cither evi-
dence that’s available shows that it
is. Charity likes to think of the Bridge
as giving the lie to that evidence.”

“The West hasn’t many more
years,” Wagoner agreed, astonish-
ingly. “Still and all, the West has
been responsible for some really tow-
ering achievements in its time. Per-
haps the Bridge could be considered
as the last and the mightiest of them
all.”

“Not by me,” Helmuth said. “The
building of gigantic projects for ritual

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

purposes — doing a thing for the sake
of doing it — is the last act of an al-
ready dead culture. Look at the py-
ramids in Egypt for an example. Or
an even more idiotic and more enor-
mous example, bigger than anything
human beings have accomplished yet,
the laying out of the ‘Diagram of
Power’ over the whole face of Mars.
If the Martians had put all that
energy into survival instead, they’d
probably be alive yet.”

“Agreed,” Wagoner said.

“All right. Then maybe you’ll also
agree that the essence of a vital cul-
ture is its ability to defend itself. The
West has beaten off the Soviets for a
century now — but as far as I can see,
the Bridge is the West’s ‘Diagram of
Power,’ its pyramids, or what have
you. All the money and the resources
that went into the Bridge are going to
be badly needed, and won't be there,
when the next Soviet attack comes.”
“Which will be very shortly, I’m
told,” Wagoner said, with complete
calm. “Furthermore, it will be suc-
cessful, and in part it will be success-
ful for the very reasons you’ve out-
lined. For a man who’s been cut off
from the Earth for years, Helmuth,
you seem to know more about what’s
going on down there than most of the
general populace does.”

“Nothing promotes an interest in
Earth like being off it,” Helmuth said.
“And there’s plenty of time to read
out here.” Either the drink was
stronger than he had expected, or the

BRIDGE

senator’s calm concurrence in the col-
lapse of Helmuth ’s entire world had
given him another shove toward noth-
ingness; his head was spinning.

Wagoner saw it. He leaned for-
ward suddenly, catching Helmuth flat-
footed. “However,” he said, “it’s dif-
ficult for me to agree that the Bridge
serves, or ever did serve, a ritual pur-
pose. The Bridge served a huge prac-
tical purpose which is now fulfilled —
the Bridge, as such, is now a defunct
project.”

“Defunct?” Helmuth repeated
faintly.

“Quite. Of course we’ll continue
to operate it for a while, simply be-
cause you can’t stop a process of that
size on a dim^, and that’s just as well
for people like Dillon who are emo-
tionally tied up in it. You’re the one
person with any authority in the
whole station who has already lost
enough interest in the Bridge to make
it safe for me to tell you that it’s being
abandoned.”

“But why?”

“Because,” Wagoner went on qui-
etly, “the Bridge has now given us
confirmation of a theory of stupendous
importance — so important, in my
opinion, that the imminent fall of the
West seems like a puny event in com-
parison. A confirmation, incidentally,
which contains in it the seeds of ulti-
mate destruction for the Soviets, what-
ever they may win for themselves in
the next fifty years or so.”

79

“I suppose,” Helmuth said, puz-
zled, “that you mean antigravity?”
For the first time, it was Wagoner’s
turn to be taken aback. “Man,” he
said at last, “do you know everything
I want to tell you? I hope not, or my
conclusions will be mighty suspicious.
Surely Charity didn’t tell you we had
antigravity; I strictly enjoined him
not to mention it.”

“No, the subject’s been on my
mind,” Helmuth said. “But I cer-
tainly don’t see why it should be so
world-shaking, any more than I see
how the Bridge helped to bring it
about. I thought it had been de-
veloped independently, for the fur-
ther exploitation of the Bridge, and
would step up Bridge operation, not
discontinue it.”

“Not at all. Of course, the Bridge
has given us information in thousands
of different categories, much of it very
valuable indeed. But the one job that
only the Bridge could do was that
of confirming, or throwing out, the
Biackett-Dirac equations.”

“Which are—?”

“A relationship between magnetism
and the spinning of a massive body —
that much is the Dirac part of it. The
Blackett Equation seemed to show
that the same formula also applied to
gravity. If the figures we collected on
the magnetic field strength of Jupiter
forced us to retire the Dirac equations,
then none of the rest of the informa-
tion we’ve gotten from the Bridge
would have been worth the money

80

we spent to get it. On the other hand,
Jupiter was the only body in the solar
system available to us which was big
enough in all relevant respects to
make it possible for us to test those
equations at all. They involve quanti-
ties of enormous orders of magnitudes.

“And the figures show that Dirac
was right. They also show that Blackett
■was right. Both magnetism and gravity
are phenomena of rotation.

“I won’t bother to trace the suc-
ceeding steps, because I think you
can work them out for yourself. It’s
enough to say that there’s a drive-
generator on board this ship which is
the complete and final justification of
all the hell you people on the Bridge
gang have been put through. The
gadget has a long technical name, but
the technies who tend it have already
nicknamed it the spindizzy, because
of what it does to the magnetic mo-
ment of any atom — any atom —
within its field.

“While it’s in operation, it abso-
lutely refuses to notice any atom
outside its own influence. Further-
more, it will notice no other strain or
influence which holds good beyond the
borders of that field. It’s so snooty
that it has to be stopped down to
almost nothing when it’s brought close
to a planet, or it won’t let you land.
But in deep space . . . well, it’s
impervious to meteors and such trash,
of course; it’s impervious to gravity;
and — it hasn’t the faintest interest in
any legislation about top speed limits.”

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

“You’re kidding,” Helmuth said.
“Am I, now? This ship came to
Ganymede directly from Earth. It
did it in a little under two hours,
counting maneuvering time.”

Helmuth took a defiant pull at
his drink. “This thing really has no
top speed at all?” he said. “How can
you be sure of that?”

“Well, we can’t,” Wagoner ad-
mitted. “After all, one of the un-
fortunate things about general mathe-
matical formulas is that they don’t
contain cut-off points to warn you of
areas where they don’t apply. Even
quantum mechanics is somewhat sub-
ject to that criticism. However, we
expect to know pretty soon just how
fast the spindizzy can drive an object,
if there is any limit. We expect you to
tell us.”

“I?”

“Yes, Helmuth, you. The coming
debacle on Earth makes it absolutely
imperative for us — the West — to get
interstellar expeditions started at
once. Richardson Observatory, on the
Moon, has two likely-looking systems
picked out already — one at Wolf 359,
another at 61 Cygni — and there are
sure to be hundreds of others where
Earth-like planets are highly probable.
We want to scatter adventurous peo-
ple, people with a thoroughly indoc-
trinated love of being free, all over
this part of the galaxy, if it can be
done.

“Once they’re out there, they’ll be
free to flourish, with no interference

BRIDGE

from Earth. The Soviets haven’t the
spindizzy yet, and even after they
steal it from us, they won’t dare allow
it to be used. It’s too good and too
final an escape route.

“What we want you to do . . .
now I’m getting to the point, you
see ... is to direct this exodus.
You’ve the intelligence and the cast
of mind for it. Your analysis of the
situation on Earth confirms that, if
any more confirmation were needed.
And — there’s no future for you on
Earth now.”

“You’ll have to excuse me,” Hel-
muth said, firmly. “ I’m in no condition
to be reasonable now; it’s been more
than I could digest in a few moments.
And the decision doesn’t entirely rest
with me, either. If I could give you an
answer in . . . let me see . . . about
three hours. Will tha^be soon enough?”

“That’ll be fine,” the senator said.

“And so, that’s thestory,” Helmuth
said.

Eva remained silent in her chair
for a long time.

“One thing I don’t understand,”
she said at last. “Why did you come
to me? I’d have thought that you’d
find the whole thing terrifying.”

“Oh, it’s terrifying, all right,” Hel-
muth said, with quiet exultation.
“But terror and fright are two differ-
ent things, as I’ve just discovered.
We were both wrong, Evita. I was
wrong in thinking that the Bridge
was. a d.ea.d end. You were wrong in

81

thinking of it as an end m itself.

“I don’t understand you.”

“All right, let’s put it this way:
The work the Bridge was doing was
worth-while, as. I know now — so I was
wrong in being frightened of it, in
calling it a bridge to nowhere.

“But you no more saw where it was
going than I, and you made the Bridge
the be-all and end-all of your exist-
ence.

“Now, there’s a place to go to; in
fact there are places — hundreds of
places. They’ll be Earthlike places.
Since the Soviets are about to win
Earth, those places will be more
Earthlike than Earth itself, for the
next century or so at least! ”

She said, “Why are you telling me
this? Just to make peace between us? ”
“I’m going to take on this job,
Evita, if you’ll go along?”

She turned swiftly, rising out of the
chair with a marvelous fluidity of
motion. At the same instant, all the
alarm bells in the station went off at
once, filling every metal cranny with
a jangle of pure horror.

“Posts!” the speaker above Eva’s
bed roared, in a distorted, gigantic
version of Charity Dillon’s voice.
“Peak storm overload! The STD is
now passing the Spot. Wind velocity has
already topped all previous records, and
part of the land mass has begun to
set lie. This is an A-l overload emer-
gency,'*

Behind Charity’s bellow, the winds •
of Jupiter made a spectrum of con-
tinuous, insane shrieking. The Bridge
was responding with monstrous groans
of agony. There was another sound,
too, an almost musical cacophony of
sharp, percussive tones, such as a
dinosaur might make pushing its way
through a forest of huge steel tuning-
forks. Helmuth had never heard that
sound before, but he knew what it was.

The deck of the Bridge was splitting
up the middle.

After a moment more, the uproar
dimmed, and the speaker said, in
Charity’s normal voice, “Eva, you
too, please. Acknowledge, please. This
is it — unless everybody comes on duty
at once, the Bridge may go down
within the next hour.”

“Let it,” Eva responded quietly.

There was a brief, startled silence,
and then a ghost of a human sound.
The voice was Senator Wagoner’s,
and the sound just might have been
a chuckle.

Charity’s circuit clicked out.

The mighty death of the Bridge
continued to resound in the little room.

After a while, the man and the
woman went to the window, and
looked past the discarded bulk of
Jupiter at the near horizon, where
there had always been visible a few
stars.

THE END

Ml

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

The Horsehead Nebula — dust in incalculable quantities, the dust between the stars — shows that
our own Galaxy is as foggy and as much swept by the dust-winds as are the others we see.

BIRTHPLACE FOR PLANETS

It MV US 1 . MYERS

Richardson recently wrote on Turbulence; here an amateur
cosmologist suggests a ivay in which a colossal turbulence , known
to exist, might lead to the making of suns and planets.

Photographs: Mount Wilson Observatory

BIRTHPLACE FOR PLANETS

83

The question has been asked and
answered in many ways: How was the
Earth created? Mythology blamed the
deed on a variety of gods. Science at-
tempts to replace the gods with nat-
ural forces. Laplace pictured around
the sun a great shrinking globe of gas,
dropping off rings of matter to con-
geal into planets as its size diminished.
Chamberlin and Moulton and ot lifers
suggested that the planets were the
resulting wreckage of a stellar traffic
accident of some sort. These hypoth-
eses have been remodeled and polished
in more recent years, but as yet no
account of planetary evolution has
been received as compatible with
known natural laws.

This is a statement of yet another
possible solution of the problem of
planetary origin. Since a hypothesis
should have a name, I call it the
Galactic Articulation hypothesis. And,
like Laplace, I offer it “with that
diffidence which ought always to at-
tach to whatever is not tha result of
observation or of calculation.” More-
over, I welcome criticism.

The solar system is not especially
complicated, nor is it, on the other
hand, too simple and barren to con-
tain hints concerning the nature of its
birth process. Possibly the nature of
this process has not been discovered
because the hypotheses have invari-
ably placed the sun in an environment
generally similar to the one it now has.
In such a setting, where stars are
separated by several light-years of

84

black emptiness, the theorists gave
the sun another star or a gas cloud,
and waited expectantly for the birth
pains to start. They got nothing but
abortions.

Let us take a look at the galaxy
and see what sort of surroundings the
sun probably really had some three
billion years ago, that is, a billion
years before geologists believe the
Earth’s oldest sedimentary rocks to
have been formed. To do this, we will
have to infer quite a bit from what our
telescopes show of other galactic sys-
tems, and try to superimpose this in-
formation on what little we can see
of our own Milky Way.

The vast majority of large galaxies
have rotational symmetry. Some of
these star masses are fairly solid-look-
ing ellipsoids, ranging from almost
spherical forms to thin lens shapes.
The thinnest of these systems present
as a cross-section an ellipse of .07
eccentricity. This amount of eccentric-
ity appears to be the limit beyond
which a galactic system cannot be
stable in the ellipse state.

The systems with rotational sym-
metry are usually spirals, however.
In these the nucleus has two major
star streams projecting from opposite
edges and spiraling away from the
system’s center. It seems logical to
assume that this is the normal shape
of a rotating galaxy in which the
speed of rotation overbalances the
galactic gravity sufficiently to cause
the eccentricity of the system to pass

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

the E7 limit. By way of illustration,
if the rotation of the Earth should
gradually become faster, the planet
would begin flattening at the poles
and finally the ground at the bulging
equator would attain escape velocity
and fly off into space. If, in addition,
there were longitudinal tidal bulges
on opposite sides of the planet, most
of the departing material would
break away from the high points
where the tidal bulges crossed the
equatorial bulge, and we would have
two arms of earth spiraling away from
opposite longitudes of the equator.

In a spiral galaxy, such as astron-
omers believe ours to be, the nucleus
is far denser than are the spiral arms.
In almost all photographs of other
spiral systems this fact is obvious.
Supporting evidence is the globular
clusters of our own system, which
may be considered as lumps in the
pudding — chunks of nucleus that have
managed to resist attenuation in the
process of leaving the nucleus. Within
these clusters, stars are separated by
light-minutes rather than light-years.
In our nucleus, then, we have stars
separated by no more than planetary

Two plates of the Barred Spiral nebula (N.G.C. 5383, Canes Venatici) taken with different
exposures. The basically gassy-dusty nature of Galaxies is shown in the longer (left)
exposure; the structure of the barred spiral is clearer in the shorter.

BIRTHPLACE FOR PLANETS 85

distances, like present binary stars.

Apparently the arms actually are
being projected from a rotating mass
due to a force similar at least to cen-
trifugality. This is evident from the
fact that the arms remain unbroken
in spite of the fact that the period of
rotation of the nucleus is shorter than
it is for the arms in many neighboring
spirals. In other words, since old arm
material is constantly being left be-
hind by rotational speed, new arm
material must be constantly leaving
the nucleus in order to maintain con-
tinuous arms.

In our galaxy, the period of galactic
revolution at the sun’s present posi-
tion has been estimated at something
more than two hundred million years.
The period of rotation for the nucleus
we assume to be less. The galaxy has
made approximately ten turns since
Earth’s earliest sedimentary deposits
were laid.

Let’s go back some three billion
years and take a look around. Let’s
go into the galactic nucleus and settle
down on a particular bit of stellar mat-
ter and await developments. Pretty
hot here — good thing we didn’t bring
our bodies along. Looking upward
from our star we see almost unbroken
whiteness — the neighboring stars are
so close together that their disks over-
lap. If our star revolves, we see a sec-
tion of sky that is a little mottled.
Patches of very light gray show be-
tween some of the star disks in this

section, which leads us to believe that
our observation post is near the nu-
clear rim. We are puzzled over the
gaps not being outer-space black, but
our spectroscope — we happened to
bring one along— tells us that these
spots are filled with highly ionized
atoms of iron, calcium, and other
elements. The spectrum lines are
those for what was once called coro- :
nium, the substance of coronas. Fur-
ther investigation shows us that the
vacuum between nuclear stars is thick
with ionized atoms of every element
on the chart. In “cold” space these
atoms would soon cool off and drop
back to their parent suns, but here
there is little chance for them to lose
their ionization charges with nearby
suns streaming hard radiations at
them from all directions. We call this
ionized matter coronium for conveni-
ence.

As time passes more gray spots ap-
pear. We find that our star is moving
closer to the rim of the nucleus. We
are going into an arm — or maybe
we’re already in the arm — it’s hard to
tell from our position. The stars
around us are shifting restlessly. To
the rimward they seem to be slowing
up and hanging back, while towards
the galactic center they maintain full
speed. Our star, between the two
movements, is influenced by both.
The rimside stars each give it a little
backward tug as they are passed, and
as it is slowed down the centerward
stars try to speed it up again. Tidal

86

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

The Smooth Spiral type (M51, N.G.C. 5194, Cones

butlges, set up by these passing bodies,
cause our star to rotate. Also they
start the coronium swirling around our
star. There is quite a bit of this re-
volving coronium, we notice, extend-
ing out several light-hours from our
equator. This belt of ionized atoms
passes closer to the neighbors than
does our star and feels the brunt of
their gravity fields as well as ab-
sorbing some frictional thrust from
their own coronium sheaths. In fact,
we conclude, after taking careful ob-
servations, our star’s oversized corona

BIRTHPLACE FOR PLANETS

Venafici) is articulated close to the central nucleus.

has acquired hundreds of times more
angular momentum than the star it-
self has.

Realizing this, we view each other
with wild surmise. “Eureka!” some-
one shouts. This, we know, is a very
important spot in the galaxy, and
after some debate we decide to call it
the area of galactic articulation. It is
the place where one section of the
galaxy is jointed to another. As in
most flexible joints, some friction is
involved. The outer material, which
has escaped into a spiral arm, is no

87

longer rotating as if a solid part of the
nucleus, but revolves around it with a
longer period. As each new star leaves
the nucleus it is obliged to act as a
ball bearing of sorts between the
nucleus and the outer material until
it becomes a part of the outer material.
The coronium sheath of each star
normally goes through this process
of absorbing angular momentum from
contrasting galactic movements as its
adopted stellar body passes through
the area of articulation.

Is this area really at the edge of the
nucleus? As we can’t tell from our
observation point we are forced to
speculate. In some galactic systems
the inner portions of the arms appear
to rotate as a solid part of the nu-
cleus. Such spirals do not show smooth
outward curves — they first stream
straight away from the center, and
then bend abruptly as if they were for
the first time free from the restraining
solidity of the nuclear mass. In the
“barred” spirals the arms go straight
out from the center for almost the full
diameter of the system, then mdke
right angle turns and proceed to form
a circle around the nucleus. Since we
are not sure which category our spiral
fits — smooth, angular, or barred — all
we can say is that the articulation
area is at that point where matter
ceases to rotate with the nucleus and
begins to revolve around it.

Let’s see what our star is up to now.
It seems to have more elbow room

88

than formerly — its neighbors are now
light-days away instead of hours or
minutes. Even then there is a great
flood of light coming from the entire
sky.

The coronium sheath captures our
attention. No longer affected appreci-
ably by gravity or friction from the
neighbors, it is now influenced mainly
by the gravity and light of our star
and light of other stars. These forces
have varying effects on its different
elements. The heavier atoms, such as
iron, are attracted relatively more by
our star’s gravity and repelled rela-
tively less by its light pressure than
are the lighter atoms, such as hydro-
gen. Thus, a sorting process takes
place in the great disk of ionized par-
ticles, with the heavy atoms tending
to circle closer to the star and the light
ones farther out. This sorting is far
from thorough. The angular momen-
tum is not the same for all the atoms
of any given element and they cannot
all gather at the same distance from
the star. Light from neighboring bod-
ies also disrupts this sorting.

While this is going on, the atoms
begin to loose their ionization charges
since the total present radiant energy
is far less than it was in the nucleus.
Here and there two tired-atoms bump
into each other and lack the strength
to bounce apart. Another atom joins
them, and then another similar colony.
Soon a particle of matter with ap-
preciable mass is formed — enough to
cast a shadow, even though a mi-

ASTOTJNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

Angled Spiral (M33, N.G.C. 598, Triangulum) has articulation areas just beyond the nucleus
proper. But comes the question: Is our own Galaxy a Barred, Smooth or Angled spiral?

4

croscopic one. tance from the star that balances the

This shadow is important. Remem- star’s attraction against the body’s
ber, the surrounding stars are still angular momentum; this momentum,
close enough to cause a flow of light of course, representing the total former
pressure from all sides. Under such momentum of its atomic particles,
conditions a solid nonradiant body It falls some distance toward the star
breaks the balance of radiant power — this fall being gradual as mass is
on the atoms in its vicinity and the acquired — and its orbit develops some
atoms dive for the hole in the pressure degree of eccentricity. As it is not re-
created by the body like dust for an volving at the same speed nor in
air vent. The body grows rapidly. quite the same direction as are the
By growing the body becomes less remaining loose atoms, it continually
affected by light pressure than by approaches and picks up more of them,
gravity. It seeks a new orbital dis- The body also runs across smaller

BIRTHPLACE FOR PLANETS

89

bodies like itself and pulls them in, constantly being pushed ahead as
but sometimes the lesser body refuses new mass is added, and as a result the
to fall and goes into business as a planet rotates in the same direction
satellite, trying to compete with the in which it revolves,
older and larger firm in capturing the We notice that the satellites usually
atomic customers. The autocratic sun revolve about their primaries in the
is on the side of big business, and same direction in which the planets
when the new planet and its satellite circle the sun. Since they go through
are near enough the star dislodges the the same formative process as did
satellite from its orbit. A large plane- their primaries, only later, they are
tary body at some distance from the usually captured when they fall to-
star can capture and keep a sizable ward the sun to adjust their orbits,
retinue of satellites. Most of them, if their sizes are of any

The vast majority of particles lie consequence, form at a greater dis-
very near the plane of the ecliptic and tance from the sun. than did their
approach the new planetary body primaries, because the belt where the
either from the inside or the outside primary developed was swept rela-
of the body’s orbit. Generally, those tively clean of building material,
approaching from the outside have Therefore, the satellite has more
the most angular momentum — since angular momentum for its mass than
most of them were nearer to, and more does its chosen planet. As it falls sun-
influenced by, the neighbor stars in ward, it comes under the influence of
the articulation area. Thus, the side the planet’s gravity, which supple^
of the planet away from the sun is ments that of the sun to pull it closer

90

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE -FICTION

than it originally intended to come.
Until influenced by the planet, the
satellite had the longer period of revo-
lution. Hence, it was overtaken by the
planet. Its first crossing of the plan-
et’s orbit is made ahead of the planet
— if it is to become a stable satellite —
thus establishing itself in an orbit
similar to the planet’s in direction.

A few minor satellites are retrograde
in their revolutions and their small
sizes suggest that they had pretty
lean pickings in their formative area,
either near or inside their planet’s
orbit or slightly outside the ecliptic
plane. Their angular momentum is
less for their mass than is that of their
primary, indicating that they must
have tried to establish themselves in-
side tlie planet’s orbit originally with
shorter revolutionary periods. When
attracted into an orbit around the
planet, they overtake and pass it on
the inside of its orbit, thus setting up

their revolutionary motion as retro-
grade.

While this process is going on, all
the nonradiating bodies are still being
enlarged by atomic particles. The
bodies farther from the sun capture
relatively more light elements and
fewer heavy elements than do the
inner planets. Beyond the planetar}''
system, the neighboring stars are con-
tinuing to recede as the stellar material
in the galactic arm disperses. After
a while, their light pressure ceases to
be an important force in the new
planetary system, and many of the
remaining free particles are pushed
into outer space by the sun’s radi-
ance.

Much of the energy accumulated
in the planets by their formation is
dispersed as heat. They crust over and
some of them grow trees and things to
climb said trees and swing from the
limbs.

•vr<:

Capture of Normal Satellite io / ur

Capture of Retrograde Satellite ~

BIRTHPLACE FOR PLANETS

91

Let us sum up this whole process in
a chronological outline:

I Pre-Articulation

A. The sun is a “particle” in the
rotating mass of the galactic nucleus.
It is separated by light-minutes from
its nearest star neighbors. Stellar rela-
tionships are at random. Between the
stars is an “atmosphere” of ionized
atoms.

B. The sun’s movements carry it
near the rim of the nucleus and toward
one of the articulation areas at the
base of — or some distance out — one
of the spirals. Surrounding conditions
do not change appreciably, although
the neighboring stars may recede
slightly.

II Articulation

A. The sun reaches the break-away
point where stellar material is freed
from nuclear solidity.

B. Previously freed stars moving
backward relative to the sun and nu-
clear stars moving forward exert op-
posing forces on opposite sides of the
sun and its sheath. The sheath es-
pecially receives a great deal of angular
momentum, which flattens it into a
thin disk extending out several light-
hours from the sun’s equator. While
this is happening," the neighbor stars
are dispersing more and more — they
are now light-days from the sun.

C. Moving farther away from the
nucleus, the sun and its neighbors
leave the area of articulation and be-

92

come part of the freely revolving
spiral. Stellar relationships again be-
come random. Within the sun’s sheath
the atoms are being sorted with the
heavier elements tending sunward
while the lighter ones stay farther
away.

Ill Post- Articulation

A. The neighbor stars are still close
enough to exert omnidirectional light
pressure on atomic particles. But since
the total radiant energy is decreased,
the sheath atoms begin losing their
ionizing charges and join into bits of
solid matter.

B. These bits of matter form shad-
ows into which more atoms are pushed
by the light pressure. As a planetary
body grows, its shadow becomes capa-
ble of collecting atoms from greater
and greater distances.

C. As an embryo planet gains mass,
its movements become more inde-
pendent of light pressure. Thus, the
planet drops some distance sunward
to compensate this pressure loss. It
continues to grow, and the kinetic
energy of falling atoms is diffused as
heat.

D. Smaller bodies which form later
are sometimes captured as satellites
by a planet, usually when they drop
toward the sun to adjust their orbits.

E. The receding neighbors move to
light-year distances. The planetary
system is complete.

That, then, is the Galactic Articula-

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION'

*

(ion Hypothesis of Planetary Evolu-
tion. It is on the whole so simple and
— to me — logical that I can hardly
believe no one has thought of it be-
fore. Being pretty much in the realm
of pure speculation, it probably cannot
be definitely proved or disproved —
only credited or discredited.

Some of the solar system’s phe-
nomena are not explained by this
scheme, but it seems to account for
the major problems. The formation
of the asteroid belt and Saturn’s
rings could be due to later incidents
of a more accidental nature, for in-
stance. The extreme orbital eccentric-
ity of the Uranian satellites in relation
to the plane of the ecliptic suggests
that all was not peaches and cream in
the articulation area. Possibly a star
passed too close to the flattened atomic
sheath and warped the Uranian sector
out of kilter.

If the hypothesis is true as stated,
planetary systems come about as a
normal result of galactic forces, and
our local system is not a lonely prod-
uct of some fortuitous set of circum-
stances. Almost every star that has
passed as a unit through the area of
articulation should have a family
of planets more or less like our own.
Since the various planetary systems
got their building material from the
possibly homogeneous nuclear coro-
nium , they may resemble each other
in chemical make-up rather than

THE

agreeing with that of their suns.
Differences of gravity and radiant
pressure from sun to sun will of course
have some influence, but essentially
planets are children of the galaxy,
rather than of the nursemaid stars
they circle.

Stars that pass through the articu-
lation area as members of groups, that
is, as binaries or as clusters, would
not have planetary systems like ours.
Some of them may have planets of
sorts, but hardly large, stable, smooth-
running systems. We do not know
what percentage of the single stars
in our sky are not actually members
of open clusters, but the number of
them may be extremely large.

In a sense this hypothesis kicks the
question of creation upstairs. While
the solar system got its momentum
charge as a by-product of galactic
spiraling, where did the galaxy get
enough angular momentum to start
throwing off a spiral in the first place?
By shrinking? Or by maintaining its
size while the universe as a whole
expanded?

Reminds me of the wheels Ezekiel
is said to have seen “a-turning, way
up in the middle of the air.” While our
little wheel — the planetary system —
is run by motion acquired from the
big wheel — the galaxy — rather than
by faith, I am still inclined to let
“the big wheel run by the grace of
God.”

END

BIRTHPLACE FOR PLANETS

93

SYMBOLIC LOGIC AND
METAMATHEMATICS

BY CRISPIN KIM-BRADLEY

A discussion wherein the interesting idea is brought out
that there are things which are true, and yet cannot be
proven true— and it can be proven that their truth can
never be proven!

An old subject, which has been com- Today we stand, with respect to
paratively stagnant for centuries, has logic, where the age of Galileo and
taken on new life. Logic, which in the Newton stood with respect to the
hands of the medieval followers of coming development of physics, or
Aristotle had been shackled to the where Lobatchevsky and Riemann
study of the syllogism, has undergone stood with respect to geometry. The
a profound and rigorous transforma- new logic has so. far outstripped the
tion which has elevated it to a position classical Aristotelian logic in power
of prominence and import among the and breadth of scope that the connec-
sciences. In a few short years it has tion between the two is hardly dis-
climbed from a comparatively trivial cernible. In this there is an analogy
field, concerned largely with the analy- to the arithmetic of primitive tribes
sis and codification of results origi- as compared to modern mathematics,
nating in antiquity, to a vigorous new To distinguish it from traditional
field, wherein important discoveries logic, modern logic is known in the
are being made daily and whose in- literature by the various appellations
fluence had already been felt markedly symbolic logic, mathematical logic, lo-
in the foundations of mathematics and gistic, et cetera. The first of these re-
tire physical sciences. fleets the complete symbolization so

94

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

characteristic of the subject and in
which lies the source of its power.
Mathematicians discovered long ago
that without the adoption of new and
more versatile ideographic symbols
little progress could be made because
no human mind could grasp the neces-
sary relationships in terms of the
phonograms of ordinary language. But
even today much of the deductive
technique of modern mathematics,
other than that which involves the
rote manipulation of the mathematical
symbols, is carried out on a relatively
primitive verbal level as is evident by
the large verbal content of most
mathematical publications.

Also, to avoid verbosity, many tacit
steps in deduction are left to the in-
genuity of the reader even when they
may not be immediately apparent.
This can be remedied by the applica-
tion of the techniques of symbolic logic
with which the most minute detail of a
deduction could be symbolized. A
mathematician' might justify a certain
step in a mathematical argument,
verbally, as follows: “Between any
two numbers I can always find a
third.” Or, more precisely: “For any
x, and any y, there is a z such that, if
x is less than y then z is greater than x
but smaller than y.” The logician, on
the other hand, would symbolize the
content of this passage as follows:

(x) (y) (Ez) (x<y=>x<z< y).

The germ of the idea of a symbolic
calculus can be traced at least as far

back as Leibnitz — 1646-1716 — the
eminent German philosopher-mathe-
matician and co-discoverer, with New-
ton* of the calculus, whose dream it
was to found a universal calculus of
reasoning which would provide a
mechanical solution to any mathe-
matical problem. This calculus ratici-
nator, as he called it, would reduce all
reasoning to a species of calculation,
and more — it would by its very nature
actually guide and direct the calcula-
tor toward the desired deductions.
But the historical importance of Leib-
nitz lies less in any positive contribu-
tions than in his prophetic insight and
in the stimulus his ideas exercised
upon other minds.

The first, important contribution to
the actual development of the subject
was made by George Boole, an obscure
British mathematician and school-
teacher, with the publication in 1854
of his work “ The Law's of Thought.”
Bertrand Russell has remarked that
pure mathematics was discovered by
Boole in this work. In it he established
the foundations of what is now known
as the propositional calculus, concern-
ing which we will have more to say
later, and thus took the first step to-
ward the realization of the Leibnizian
dream. He actually reduced reasoning
to a kind of calculation — but not all
reasoning. Beyond a certain level a
method was still lacking.

Subsequent writers, among them De
Morgan, E. Schroder, and C. S. Peirce,

SYMBOLIC LOGIC AND METAMATHEMATICS

95

took to and elaborated the new algebra
of logic and brought it to a fairly high
degree of perfection. Then in the last
quarter of the nineteenth century a
little known German philosopher,
Gottlob Frege, published a series of
works, “ Begrijfsschrifl, Die Grundla-
gen der Arithmetik” and “ Grunigesetze
der Arithmetik,” works of a very re-
markable and profound nature. In
these works Frege showed that arith-
metic. and other fundamental parts of
mathematics were actually branches
of logic; i.e., certain notions which
prior to that time were held to be
purely mathematical in nature — the
notions of number, function, sum,
product, power, limit, derivative, et
cetera — could be rigorously defined in
terms of a few elementary notions of
logic — tire notions of class, identity,
relation, “and,” “or,” “if . . . then,”
et cetera. This was a remarkable dis-
covery indeed. Concepts which had
eluded exact definition for centuries
succumbed to Frege's penetrating
analysis. Mankind had been employ-
ing some of these notions, the idea of
number for example, since prehistory,
yet in a sense it might be said that
Frege was the first person to know
what a number really is.

What was the secret method, the
key, to this all powerful analysis? It
was a system of symbolic logic, in-
vented by Frege himself, which ad-
vanced beyond tire propositional cal-
culus of Boole and entered the realm
of what is known as the functional

calculi and quantification theory, on
which we will elaborate later. With
this invention Frege completed the
program of reducing all formal reason-
ing to one comprehensive system.

It might be thought that works of
such fundamental importance would
be eagerly and immediately embraced
by the scientific, mathematical, and
philosophical world. But unfortu-
nately this was not the case. Frege had
invented a symbolism in which to
couch his seminal ideas, a symbolism
which was difficult and erudite. The
intricacy of his symbolism prevented
his work receiving the immediate
recognition it deserved and its signifi-
cance went, for a time, unnoticed.

But not for long. Others were think-
ing along the same lines. The Italian
mathematician, Giuseppe Peano, look-
ing about for a device with which to
expound his notions on the founda-
tions of the number system and find-
ing none, invented his own symbolism.
Fortunately it took a very neat and
richly suggestive form, quickly grasped
by the eye and mind. Then in 1900,
while attending an international con-
gress of philosophy in Paris, Bertrand
Russell and Alfred North Whitehead,
two eminent British philosophers,
learned of Peano’s system and were
struck by the superiority of his ideo-
grams over all other existing sym-
bolisms.

Experimenting with the new sym-
bolism, Russell was able to discover,
quite independently of Frege, the defi-

- 96

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

nition of number and other funda- b c b.c

mental mathematical concepts. He T T T

conceived the idea that perhaps all of F T F

mathematics, not only arithmetic, T F F

could be reduced to logic. Together F F F

with Whitehead he undertook the pro-
gram of so reducing mathematics, thus The table is interpreted by reading
showing that mathematics and logic horizontally as follows: If b is true and
are one and the same. The fruit of c is true, then b.c is true; if b is false
their collaboration, the monumental but c is true, then b.c is false, et cetera,
and epoch-making “ Principia Mathe- An operation which affects a single
malics” was published in three vol- statement is the operation of denial,
umes in 1910-1913. With this work which in ordinary language is usually
symbolic logic emerged from adoles- expressed with the word “not,” and in
cence and became a completely mature modern logic is symbolized by the
science. tilde Thus, to revert to our

previous example, if we wish to sym-
The Propositional Calculus bolize the statement “The birds are

not singing” we do so with the symbol
If we consider the various ways in /— 'b (read “not-b”). This is called
which statements, or propositions, are negation , and the negation of a true
combined and transformed in ordinary statement is false, whereas the nega-
language, we find that most of them tion of a false statement is true. Thus
can be reduced to four or five funda- negation has the following, self-ex-
mental modes. Thus two statements b planatory, truth table:
and c can be combined by the word
“and,” symbolized by a dot, to form
a compound statement b.c (read “b
and c”). If b stands for the statement
“The. birds are singing” and c for The two operations, conjunction
“The corn is ripe” then b.c would and negation, can be combined in
symbolize the compound statement various ways to give various com-
“ The birds are singing and the com is pound statements. Thus “The birds
ripe.” This mode of combining state- are not singing but the corn is ripe”
ments is called conjunction and the would be rendered / — ' b.c, whereas
conjunction of two statements is to be “ It is not the case that the birds are
regarded as true only if both state- singing and the corn is not ripe” be-
ments are true. Thus conjunction has comes ■ — ' (b. - — ' c), et cetera,
the following truth table: A third method of statement com-

SYMBOLIC LOGIC AND METAMATHEMATICS 97

position, alternation, is rendered most
often in ordinary language by the
word “or,” and is symbolized by the
sign “V”. To express the statement
“Either the birds are singing or the
corn is ripe (or both)” we use b V c
(read “b or c”). An alternation of two
statements is true as long as one or
both statements are true. It is false
only if both statements are false. The
truth table becomes:

b

c

b V c

T

T

T

F

T

T

T

F

T

F

F

F

Two other modes of statement com-
position commonly used in the propo-
sitional calculus are the conditional
and biconditional, symbolized by “ dd ”
and “s” respectively. The condi-
tional is most closely rendered by the
idiom “if . . . then ” and the bicondi-
tional by “if and only if.” “If the
birds are singing then the corn is ripe ”
would become b dc (read “if b then
c”), and “The birds are singing if and
only if the corn is ripe” would be
rendered b = c (read “b if and only if
c”). A conditional, b dc, is regarded
as false if b is true while c is false,
otherwise it is true. A biconditional,
b 3=2 c, is true as long as b and c are
simultaneously true or simultaneously
false. If one statement is true while the
other is false, the biconditional itself is
false. From these definitions the reader
can readily construct his own truth

98

tables for the conditional and bicondi- I
tional.

From these five fundamental state- '
ment connectives more complex state-
ments can be built up at pleasure, and
the corresponding truth tables con-
structed by reference to the funda-
mental ones. A little experimentation
with these symbols quickly reveals the
fact that some statement compounds
are always true, independently of the
truth or falsity of their constituents, 1
As an illustration consider the state-
ment “ Either it is raining in Washing- '
ton or it is not” which we symbolize
by r V - — ' r. Common sense tells us
that the statement is always true re- j
gardless of the weather conditions in
Washington. A truth table analysis .
would, of course, reveal the same fact. 1
If we construct a truth table for the ]
formula rV^r by reference to the |
previously given tables for alternation j
and negation the result is as follows: I

r

^r

r V - — 'x

T

F

T

F

T

,T

For if r is true then <■ — ' r is false. 1
But the alternation rV^r would
then be true because one component
(namely r) is true, and reference to our
truth table for b V c shows that an
alternation is true as long as one com-
ponent is true. On the other hand if r
is false then , — ' r is true, and again
rVc-'r is true because this time the
other component , — ' r is true.

A formula such as r V ' r, possess- :

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION ”

ing the property of being true regard-
less of the truth or falsity of r, is called
a tautology. The literature of logic
abounds with examples of tautologies.
Some examples are:

(1) t—* (a, . — ' a)

(2) (a.b) r> b

(3) / — ' t — ' a a

These correspond respectively to
the logical laws:

(1) A statement cannot be both

true and false.

(2) If both a and b are true, then b

is true.

(3) A double negative yields a posi-

tive assertion.

Tautologies, while very important
for providing steps in logical deduc-
tions, possess an air of triviality about
them by dint of the fact that they re-
veal no new information. Thus the
above example “ Either it is raining in
* Washington or it is not” is certainly
always true but gives no meteoro-
logical data concerning the nation’s
capitol.

This example is trivial in another
respect — it is obvious. Not all tautolo-
gies, however, suffer from this second
species of triviality. Truth table analy-
sis will reveal, for example, that the
formula (t.m) V (t. t — ' b) V (. — ' t.b) V
(— ' t.p) V (- — ' m.b) V (- — ' b. t — ' p)
is tautological. If we let t stand for
“Tom is going to the movies,” and m
stand for “Mary is going to the mov-
ies,” and similarly for Bob (b) and Pat
(p), then our formula may be trans-

lated “ Either Tom and Mary are go-
ing to the movies, or Tom is going and
Bob is not, or Tom is not and Bob is,
or Tom is not and Pat is, or Mary is
not and Bob is, or Bob is not and
neither is Pat”. In view of the tau-
tological nature of our formula, the
statement will always be true, no mat-
ter what Tom, Mary, Bob, and Pat
decide to do. But purely verbal analy-
sis will avail little in revealing its
tautological character. The statement,
although a tautology, is far from
obvious.

The method of truth tables provides
then a completely mechanical check
on the validity of any formula 'Df the
propositional calculus. In this particu-
lar domain of logic the Leibnizian
dream has come true. Reasoning has
been reduced to a kind of calculation.
Because of the purely routine nature
of the calculations involved one might
suspect that a machine could be de-
vised to carry out the operations. And
this is indeed the case. In recent years
Theodore Kalin and William Burkhart
of the Harvard Computation Labora-
tory have constructed just such a
machine, and another is under de-
velopment at the University of Man-
chester, England. Thus at the level of
the propositional calculus, human in-
telligence and ingenuity may give way
to unreasoning, robotlike calculation.

The main theoretical utility of the
propositional calculus is to provide
steps in the deductive schemes neces-
sary at higher levels of logic. But the

99

SYMBOLIC LOGIC AND METAMATHEMATICS

propositional calculus has recently
found application in circuit analysis,
in consistency tests for insurance con-
tracts and public opinion polls, and
elsewhere. But undoubtedly the most
important applications are yet to
come.

Quantification Theory and
Metamathematics

But the propositional calculus by no
means comprises the whole of modern
logic. There are many sound inferences
for which the techniques of this cal-
culus are inadequate. For example,
starting with the statement “Not all
things have mass” we may wish to
deduce the statement “Some things
do not have mass.” For we feel certain
that “ If not all A’s are B’s, then some
A’s are-mot B’s” will always be true
no matter how A and B are inter-
preted.

This example has, superficially, the
appearance of a conditional and we
might attempt to symbolize it by let-
ting p stand for “All things have mass ”
and q for “Some things have mass.”
Then “If not all things have mass,
then some things do not have mass”
becomes (< — ' p 3 - — ' q). But this for-
mula, which we would expect to be a
tautology, is easily found by truth
table analysis not to be. Indeed the
formula turns out to be false if p is
false and q is true.

The difficulty lies in the fact that the
truth of our example does not follow
from its superficial structure as a con-

100

ditional, but is hidden in its finer
structure, specifically in the words
“ all ” and “ some.” Hence if logic is to
cope with this situation appropriate
rules must be set up for handling the
idioms of ordinary language which in-
volve these words. A first step is the
symbolization of these concepts.

In modern logic a statement such as
“All things have mass” would first be
reworded into the form: The state-
ment “x has mass” is trug. for all
values of x. Or, more briefly, “ For any
x, x has mass.” Similarly the state-
ment “ Some things do not have mass ”
would be reworded to “There exist
x’s for which x does not have mass.”
We can symbolize the statement “x
has mass” by the symbol M(x). Then
“x does not have mass” becomes
-~’M(x). The expression “for any x”
is symbolized by (x) and is known in
logic as the universal quantifier. “There
exist x’s for which — ” is symbolized
by (Ex) and is known as the existential
quantifier.

So finally “All things have mass”
becomes (x)M(x) and “Some things
do not have mass” becomes (Ex)

M(x). Our problem, the deduction
of the conclusion “Some things do not
have mass” from the premise “Not
all things have mass” is reduced to
the derivation of the formula (Ex)

- — 'M(x) from the formula - — ' (x)
M(x).

But where does this lead? We still
cannot apply the method of truth
tables to the new form of our example

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

and so we are apparently no better off
Ilian before. The truth of the matter
is that once we begin to examine the
fine structure of Statements, as we
have done here, the method of truth
tables must be abandoned in favor of
more adequate techniques. These
techniques depend upon a set of postu-
lates and rules of derivation by means
of which we are able to derive or prove
true statements. Thus one rule might
be stated as follows: A tilde can be
transposed past a universal quantifier
provided that the universal quantifier
is replaced by an existential quantifier.
So the rule tells that •e—' (x) may val-
idly be rewritten as (Ex) — '. Hence an
application of this rule enables us to
derive the formula (Ex) — ' M(x) from
the formula - — ' (x)M(X), and our
problem is solved.

We cannot go into the question of
what rules and postulates have been
set down for the f unctional calculus, as
this branch of logic is called, but in
practice the rules for deriving valid
statements are usually simpler and
more obvious than that stated above.
We will now compare the results in
this field with those in the proposi-
tional calculus.

In the propositional calculus we
saw that given any statement com-
pound we have, in the method of
truth tables, a perfectly mechanical
routine by which we can decide
whether the statement compound is
valid. We have what is known as a

decision procedure for the propositional
calculus. What is the corresponding
state of affairs with regard to the
functional calculus? Here again we
have a method for determining va-
lidity. We start with our postulates
and rules of derivation and try to de-
rive the statement we are testing. If
we succeed in finding a derivation, we
know that our statement is true.

But what if we fail? Then the ques-
tion concerning the validity of our
statement is still unsettled. Two possi-
bilities present themselves. Either the
statement is not valid, or it is valid
but we lack sufficient ingenuity to
prove it. Either possibility would ac-
count for our failure to find a proof. A
decision procedure is lacking for the
functional calculus, and proving state-
ments therein is not merely a matter
of routine but entails an element of
luck and ingenuity.

This is an unfortunate state of af-
fairs, and we might hope that with the
passage of time the situation might be
alleviated and a decision procedure
found, so that the functional calculus
might come under the Leibnizian pro-
gram. But unfortunately this cannot
be. Professor Alonzo Church of Prince-
ton has shown that no mechanical
routine can ever decide validity in the
functional calculus. In other words,
Professor Church has proven that cer-
tain problems cannot be solved by
machines, that intelligence is neces-
sary. To establish this result he used
certain methods and results of a field

101

SYMBOLIC LOGIC AND METAMATHEMATICS

of logic called metamathematics or the
theory of proof, a field developed by
Kurt Godel of the Institute for Ad-
vanced Study at Princeton.

But the outlook is not quite as dark
as it seems. Although a mechanical
test for validity is unobtainable, there
does exist a mechanical routine where-
by any proof, once it is found, can be
checked. In effect, proofs can be writ-
ten in such a way that they could be
checked by a robot. Hence the func-
tional calculus is half mechanical in
this sense. Man and machine can col-
laborate, men furnishing the proofs of
theorems and machines checking these
proofs for possible errors. Also, Godel
has shown, using metamathematical
methods, that the functional calculus
is complete in the sense that for every
valid theorem there does exist a proof,
whether or not we can find it.

When Frege, Russell, Whitehead
and others embarked on their program
of reducing mathematics to logic, they
soon discovered that not even the
functional calculus was adequate, and
they had to deal with higher func-
tional calculi, namely the calculus of
classes and the theory of relations. It
would take us too far afield to give
examples here, but we will indicate
what metamathematics has to say
concerning these fields.

Godel has proven the truly remark-
able fact that, not only is a decision

procedure lacking here, but, what is
far worse, the class calculus and rela-
tion theory are not complete nor com-
pletable. This means that it is possible
to formulate mathematical theorems
which are valid but which, even in
theory, it is impossible to prove, for no
proof can exist. No combination of
man and machine will suffice to find a
proof here for there is nothing to find.
Godel was actually able to construct
arithmetical theorems which are true
but unprovable. This remarkable fact
came as a shock to mathematical pre-
conceptions. For if anything is more
remarkable than the fact that certain
theorems are unprovable, it is the fact
that Godel was actually able to prove
that they are unprovable.

Bibliography

In attempting to give an overall view of
modern logic, from the foundations to the
frontier, we have had, of necessity, to omit
mention of many important, topics, multi-
valued logic for example. The interested
reader will find an already extensive, and
rapidly growing, 'iterature. We list below a
few books which, in their entirety or in their
opening chapters, are most suited to the
needs of beginners.

Cooley, J. C. “A Primer of Formal Logic.”
New York, 1942
Quine, W. V. “Mathematical Logic.” New .
York, 1940; “Methods of Logic.” New
YYirk, 1950

Reichenbach, H. “Elements of Symbolic
Logic.” New York, 1947
Tarski, A. “Introduction to Logic.” New
York, 1941

THE END

102

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

The Guards who manned
the outposts lived the life
of the battle-line sentry —
alone , desperate , first target
for the enemy from space.
But there was one way to
keep sane . . .

Illustrated by Orban

We stand on guard.”

-Motto of the Frontier Force

ITT37]

1 >111111

. Man that is born of woman
hath but a short t ime to live and is full of
misery. lie cometk up and is cut down,
like a flower; he fleet h as it were a shadow
and never continueth in one stay 1 —”

The voice of the chaplain was small
and sharp in the thin air, intoning the
words of the burial service above the
temporary lectern set up just inside
the transparent wall of the landing
field dome. Through the double trans-
parencies of the dome and the plastic
cover of the burial rocket the black-
clad ranks could see the body of the
dead stationman, Ted Waskewicz, ly-
ing back comfortably at an angle of
forty-five degrees, peaceful in death,
waxily perfect from the hands of the
embalmers, and immobile. The eyes
were closed, the cheerful, heavy fea-
tures still held their expression of
thoughtless dominance, as though
death had been a minor incident,
easily shrugged off; and the battle star
made a single blaze of color on the
tunic of the black uniform.

“Amen.” The response was a deep
bass utterance from the assembled
men, like the single note of an organ.
In the front rank of the Cadets,
Thomas Jordan’s lips moved stiffly
with the others’, his voice joining
mechanically in their chorus. For this
was the moment of his triumph, but
in spite of it, the old, old fear had come
back, the old sense of loneliness and
loss and terror of his own inadequacy.

He stood at stiff attention, eyes to
the front, trying to lose himself in the

unanimity of his classmates, to shut
out the voice of the chaplain and the
memory it evoked of an alien raid on
an undefended city and of home and
parents swept away from him in a
breath. He remembered the mass bur-
ial service read' over the shattered
ruin of the city; and the government
agency that had taken him — a ten-
year-old orphan — and given him care
and training until this day, but could
not give him what these others about
him had by natural right — the cour-
age of those who had matured in
safety.

For he had been lonely and afraid
since that day. Untouched by bomb or
shell, he had yet been crippled deep
inside of him. He had seen the enemy
in his strength and run screaming
from his spacesui-ted gangs. And what
could give Thomas Jordan back his
soul after that?

But still he stood rigidly at atten-
tion, as a Guardsman should; for he
was a soldier now, and this was part
of his duty.

The chaplain’s voice droned to a
halt. He closed his prayerbook and
stepped back from the lectern. The
captain of the training ship took his
place.

“In accordance with the conven-
tions of the Frontier Force,” he said,
crisply, “I now commit the ashes of
Station Commandant First Class,
Theodore Waskewicz, to the keeping
of time and space.”

104

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

He pressed a button on the lectern.
Beyond the dome, white fire blos-
somed out from the tail of the burial
rocket, heating the asterioid rock to
temporary incandescence. For a mo-
ment it hung there, spewing flame.
Then it rose, at first slowly, then
quickly, and was gone, sketching a
fiery path out and away, until, at al-
most the limits of human sight, it
vanished in a sudden, silent explosion
of brilliant light.

Around Jordan, the black-clad ranks
relaxed. Not by any physical move-
ment, but with an indefinable break-
ing of nervous tension, they settled
themselves for the more prosaic con-
clusion of the ceremony. The relaxa-
tion reached even to the captain, for
he about-faced with a relieved snap
and spoke to the ranks.

“Cadet Thomas Jordan. Front and
center.”

The command struck Jordan with
an icy shock. As long as the burial
service had been in progress, he had
had the protection of anonymity among
his classmates around him. Now, the
captain’s voice was a knife, cutting
him off, finally and irrevocably from
the one security his life had known,
leaving him naked and exposed. A
despairing numbness seized him. His
reflexes took over, moving his body
like a robot. One step forward, a
right face, down to the end of the row
of silent men, a left face, three steps
forward. Halt. Salute.

“Cadet Thomas Jordan reporting,

“ Cadet Thomas Jordan, I hereby
invest you with command of this
Frontier Station. You will hold it until
relieved. Under no conditions will you
enter into communications with an
enemy nor allow any creature or vessel
to pass through your sector of space
from Outside.”

“Yes, sir.”

“ In consideration of the duties and
responsibilities requisite on assuming
command of this Station, you are
promoted to the rank and title of
Station Commandant Third Class.”
“Thank you, sir.”

From the lectern the captain lifted
a cap of silver wire mesh and placed
it on his head. It clipped on to the
electrodes already buried in his skull,
with a snap that sent sound ringing
through his skull. For a second, a
sheet of lightning flashed in front of
his eyes and he seemed to feel the
weight of the memory bank already
pressing on his mind. Then lightning
and pressure vanished together to
show him the captain offering his
hand.

“My congratulations, comman-
dant.”

“Thank you, sir.”

They .shook hands, the captain’s
grip quick, nervous and perfunctory.
He took one abrupt step backward and
transferred his attention to his second
in command.

“Lieutenant! Dismiss the forma-
tion!”

STEEL BROTHER

105

It was over. The new rank locked
itself around Jordan, sealing up the
fear and loneliness inside him. With-
out listening to the barked commands
that no longer concerned him, he
turned on his heel and strode over to
take up his position by the sally port
of the training ship. He stood formally
at attention beside it, feeling the
weight of his new authority like a
heavy cloak on his thin shoulders. At
one stroke he had become the ranking
officer present. The officers — even the
captain — were nominally under his
authority, so long as their ship re-
mained grounded at his Station. So
rigidly he stood at attention that not
even the slightest tremor of the trem-
bling inside him escaped to quiver
betrayingiy in his body.

They came toward him in a loose,
dark mass that resolved itself into a
single file just beyond saluting dis-
tance. Singly, they went past him and
up the ladder into the sally port, each
saluting him as they passed. He re-
turned the salutes stiffly, mechan-
ically, walled off from these classmates
of six years by the barrier of his new
command. It was a moment when a
smile or a casual handshake would
have meant more than a little. But
protocol had stripped him of the right
to familiarity; and it was a line of
black-uniformed strangers that now
filed slowly past. His place was al-
ready established and theirs was yet
to be. They had nothing in common
any more.

106

The last of the men went past him I
up the ladder and were lost to view I
through the black circle of the sally a
port. The heavy steel plug swung "
slowly to, behind them. He turned
and made his way 'to the unfamiliar
but well-known field control panel in
the main control room of the Station.

A light glowed redly on the communi-
cations board. He thumbed a switch
and spoke into a grill set in the panel.

“Station to Ship. Go ahead.”

Overhead the loudspeaker an- i
swered.

“Ship to Station. Ready for take- 1
off.”

His fingers went swiftly over the J
panel. Outside, the atmosphere of the 1
field was evacuated and the dome slid 1
back. Tractor mechs scurried out from |
the pit, under remote control, clamped ||
huge magnetic fists on the ship, swung 1
it into launching position, then re- |
treated.

Jordan spoke again into the grill.

“Station clear. Take-off at will.”

“Thank you, Station.” He recog-
nized the captain’s voice. “And good
luck.”

Outside, the ship lifted, at first
slowly, then faster on its pillar of
flame, and dwindled away into the
darkness of space. Automatically, he
closed the dome and pumped the air
back in.

He was turning away from the con-
trol panel, bracing himself against the
moment of finding himself completely
isolated, when, with a sudden, curious

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

shock, he noticed that there was an-
other, smaller ship yet on the field.

For a moment he stared at it
blankly, uncomprehendingly. Then
memory returned and he realized that
the ship was a small courier vessel
from Intelligence, which had been
hidden by the huge bulk of the train-
ing ship. Its officer would still be
below, cutting a record tape of the
former commandant’s last memories
for the file at Headquarters. The mem-
ory lifted him momentarily from the
morass of his emotions, to attention to
duty. He turned from the panel and
went below.

In the triply-armored basement of
the Station, the man from Intelligence
was half in and half out of the memory
bank when he arrived, having cut
away a portion of the steel casing
around the bank so as to connect his
recorder direct to the cells. The sight
of the heavy mount of steel with the
ragged incision in one side, squatting
like a wounded monster, struck Jor-
dan unpleasantly; but he smoothed
the emotion from his face and walked
firmly to the bank. His footsteps rang
on the metal floor; and the man from.
Intelligence, hearing them, brought
his head momentarily outside the
bank for a quick look.

“Hi!” he said, shortly, returning to
his work. His voice continued from
the interior of the bank with a friendly,
hollow sound. “ Congratulations, com-
mandant.”

STEEL BROTHER

“Thanks,” answered Jordan, stiffly.
He stood, somewhat ill at ease, un-
certain of what was expected of him.
When he hesitated, the voice from the
bank continued.

“How does the cap feel?”

Jordan’s hands went up instinc-
tively to the mesh of silver wire on his
head. It pushed back unyieldingly at
his fingers, held firmly on the elec-
trodes.

“Tight,” he said.

The Intelligence man came crawling
out of the bank, his recorder in one
hand and thick loops of glassy tape in
the other.

“They all do at first,” he said,
squatting down and feeding one end
of the tape into a spring rewind spool.
“In a couple of days you won’t even
be able to feel it up there.”

“I suppose.”

The Intelligence man looked up at
him curiously.

“Nothing about it bothering you,
is there?” he asked. “You look a little
strained.”

“ Doesn’t everybody when the)' first
start out?”

“Sometimes,” said the other, non-
committally. “Sometimes not. Don’t
hear a sort of humming, do you?”

“No.”

“Feel any kind of pressure inside
your head?”

“No.”

“How about your eyes. See any
spots or flashes in front of them?”

“No!” snapped Jordan.

107

“Take it easy,” said the man from
Intelligence. “This is my business.”
“Sorry.”

“That’s all right. It’s just that if
there’s anything wrong with you or
the bank I want to know it.” He rose
from the rewind spool, which was now
industriously gathering in the loose
tape; and unclipping a pressure-torch
from his belt, began resealing the
aperture. “It’s just that occasionally
new officers have been hearing too
many stories about the banks in
Training School, and they’re inclined
to be jumpy.”

“Stories?” said Jordan.

“Haven’t you heard them?” an-
swered the Intelligence man. “Stories
of memory domination — stationmen
driven insane by the memories of the
men who had the Station before them.
Catatonics whose minds have got lost
in the past history of the bank, or
cases of memory replacement where
the stationman has identified himself
with the memories and personality of
the man who preceded him.”

“Oh, those,” said Jordan. “I’ve
heard them.” He paused, and then,
when the other did not go on: “What
about them? Are they true?”

The Intelligence man turned from
the lialf-resealed aperture and faced
him squarely, torch in hand.

“Some,” he said bluntly. “There’s
been a few cases like that; although
there didn’t 'have to be. Nobody’s try-
ing to sugar-coat the facts. The mem-
ory bank’s nothing but a storehouse

108

connected to you through your silver
cap — a gadget to enable you not only |
to remember everything you ever do '
at the station, but also everything '
anybody else who ever ran the Station,
did. But there’ve been a few impres-
sionable stationmen who’ve let them-
selves get the notion that the memory
bank’s a sort of a coffin with living
dead men crawling around inside it.
When that happens, there’s trouble.” ;

He turned away from Jordan, back f
to his work.

“And that’s what you thought was J
the trouble with me,” said Jordan, I
speaking to his back.

The man from Intelligence chuckled
—it was an amazingly human sound.'

“In my line, fella,” he said, “we
check all possibilities.” He finished his
resealing and turned around.

“No hard feelings?” he said.

Jordan shook his head. “Of course;
not.”

“Then I’ll be getting along.” He
bent over and picked up the spool,
which had by now neatly wound up
all the tape, straightened up and
headed for the ramp that led up from
the basement to the landing field.
Jordan fell into step beside him.

“ You’ve nothing more to do, then? ” J ,
he asked.

“Just my reports. But I can write ,
those on the way back.” They went
up the ramp and out through the lock
on to the field.

“They did a good job of repairing
the battle damage,” he went on, look-

A ST O UN DIN G SCIENCE-FICTION

ing around the Station.

“I guess they did,” said Jordan.
The two men paced soberly to the sally
port of the Intelligence ship. “Well,
so long.”

“So long,” answered the man from
Intelligence, activating the sally port
mechanism. The outer lock swung
open and he hopped the few feet up to
the opening without waiting for the
little ladder to wind itself out. “See
you in six months.”

He turned to Jordan and gave him a
casual, offhand salute with the hand
holding the wind-up spool. Jordan
returned it with training school preci-
sion. The port swung closed.

He went back to the master control
room and the ritual of seeing the ship
off. He stood looking out for a long
time after it had vanished, then turned
from the panel with a sigh to find him-
self at last completely alone.

He looked about the Station. For
the next six months this would be his
home. Then, for another six months he
would be free on leave while the Sta-
tion was rotated out of the line in its
regular order for repair, recondition-
ing, and improvements.

If he lived that long.

The fear, which had been driven a
little distance away by his conversa-
tion with the man from Intelligence,
came back.

If he lived that long. He stood, be-
mused.

Back to his mind with the letter-

STEEL BE OTHER

perfect recall of the memory bank
came the words of the other. Cata-
tonic — cases of memory replacement.
Memory domination. Had those others,
too, had more than they could bear of
fear and anticipation?

And with that thought came a sug-
gestion that coiled like a snake, in his
mind. That would be a way out. What
if they came, the alien invaders, and
Thomas Jordan was no longer here to
meet them? What if only the catatonic
hulk of a man was left? What if they
came and a man was here, but that
man called himself and knew himself
only as —

Waskewicz!

“No!” the cry came involuntarily
from his lips; and he came to himself
with his face contorted and his hands
half-extended in front of him in the
attitude of one who wards off a ghost.
He shook his head to shake the vile
suggestion from his brain; and leaned
back, panting, against the control
panel.

Not that. Not ever that. He had
surprised in himself a weakness that
turned him sick with horror. Win or
lose ; live or die. But as Jordan — not as
any other.

He lit a cigarette with trembling
fingers. So — it was over now and he
was safe. He had caught it in time. He
had his warning. Unknown to him — -
all this time — the seeds of memory
domination must have been lying
waiting within him. But now' he knew
they were there, he knew what meas-

109

ures to take. The danger lay in Waske-
wicz’s memories. He would shut his
mind off from them — would fight the
Station without the benefit of their
experience. The first stationmen on
the line had done without the aid of a
memory bank and so could he.

So.

He had settled it. He flicked on the
viewing screens and stood opposite
them, very straight and correct in the
middle of his Station, looking out at
the dots that were his forty-five doggie
mechs spread out on guard over a
million kilometers of space, looking at
the controls that would enable him to
throw their blunt, terrible, mechanical
bodies into battle with the enemy,
looking and waiting, waiting, for the
courage that comes from having faced
squarely a situation, to rise within
him and take possession of him, put-
ting an end to all fears and doubtings.

And he waited so for a long time, but
it did not come.

The weeks went swiftly by; and
that was as it should be. He had been
told what to expect, during training;
and it was as it should be that these
first months should be tense ones,
with a part of him always stiff and
waiting for the alarm bell that would
mean a doggie signaling sight of an
enemy. It was as it should be that he
should pause, suddenly, in the midst
of a meal with his fork halfway to his
mouth, waiting and expecting mo-
mentarily to be summoned; that he

110

should wake unexpectedly in the night-
time and lie rigid and tense, eyes fixed
on the shadowy ceiling and listening.
Later — they had said in training — ■
after you have become used to the
Station, this constant tension will re-
lax and you will be left at ease, with
only one little unobtrusive corner of
your mind unnoticed but forever alert.
This will come with time, they said.

So he waited for it, waited for the
release of the coiled springs inside him
and the time when the feel of the Sta-
tion would be comfortable and friendly
about him. When he had first been left
alone, he had thought to himself that
surely, in his case, the waiting would
not be more than a matter of days;
then, as the days went by and he still
lived in a state of hair-trigger sensitiv-
ity, he had given himself, in his own
mind, a couple of weeks — then a
month.

But now a month and more than a
month had gone without relaxation
coming to him; and the strain was be-
ginning to show in nervousness of his
hands and the dark circles under his
eyes. He found it impossible to sit still
either to read, or to listen to the music
that was available in the Station
library. He roamed restlessly, end-
lessly checking and rechecking the
empty space that his doggies’ viewers
revealed.

For the recollection of Waskewicz
as he lay in the burial rocket would
not go from him. And that was not as
it should be.

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE -FICTION

He could, And did, refuse to recall
the memories of Waskewicz that he
had never experienced; but his own
personal recollections were not easy
to control and slipped into his mind
when he was unaware. All else that
he could do to lay the ghost, he had
done. He had combed the Station
carefully, seeking out the little adjust-
ments and conveniences that a lonely
man will make about his home, and
removed them, even when the remov-
al meant a loss of personal comfort.
He had locked his mind securely to
the storehouse of the memory bank,
striving to hold himself isolated from
the other’s memories until familiarity

STEEL BROTHER

and association should bring him to
the point where he instinctively felt
that the Station was his and not the
other’s. And, whenever thoughts of
Waskewicz entered in spite of all
these precautions, he had dismissed
them sternly, telling himself that his
predecessor was not worth the con-
sidering.

But the other’s ghost remained,
intangible and invulnerable, as if
locked in the very metal of the walls
and floor and ceiling of the Station;
and rising to haunt him with the
memories of the training school tales
and the ominous words of the man
from Intelligence. At such times,

111

when the ghost had seized him, he
would stand paralyzed, staring in
hypnotic fascination at the screens
with their silent mechanical sentinels,
or at the cold steel of the memory
bank, crouching like some brooding
monster, fear feeding on his thoughts
— until, with a sudden, wrenching
effort of the will, he broke free of the
mesmerism and flung himself fran-
tically into the duties of the Station,
checking and rechecking his instru-
ments and the space they watched,
doing anything and everything to
drown his wild emotions in the neces-
sity for attention to duty.

And eventually he found himself
almost hoping for a raid, for the test
that would prove him, would lay the
ghost, one way or another, once and
for all. .

It came at last, as he had known it
would, during one of the rare mo-
ments when he had forgotten the
imminence of danger. He had awak-
ened in his bunk, at the beginning of
the arbitrary ten-hour day; and lay
there drowsily, comfortably, his
thoughts vague and formless, like
shadows in the depths of a lazy whirl-
pool, turning slowly, going no place.

Then — the alarm!

Overhead the shouting bell burst
into life, jerking him from his bed. Its
metal clangor poured out on the air,
tumbling from the loudspeakers in
every room all over the Station, stri-
dcnl with urgency, ' pregnant with

112

disaster. It roared, it vibrated, it
thundered, until the walls themselves
threw it back, seeming to echo in
sympathy, acquiring a voice of their
own until the room rang — until the
Station itself rang like one monster
bell, calling him into battle.

He leaped to his feet and ran to the
master control room. On the telltale
high on the wall above the viewer
screens, -the red light of number
thirty-eight doggie was flashing omi-
nously. He threw himself into the
operator’s seat before it, slapping one
palm hard down on the switch to
disconnect the alarm.

The Station is in contact with the
enemy.

The sudden silence slapped at him,
taking his breath away. He gasped
and shook his head like a man who has
had a glassful of cold water thrown -
unexpectedly in his face ; then plunged
his fingers at the keys on the master
control board in front of his seat —
Up beams. Up detector screen, estab-
lished now at forty thousand kilo-
meters distance. Switch on communi-
cations to Sector Headquarters.

The transmitter purred. Overhead,
the white light flashed as it began to
tick off its automatic signal. “Alert!
Alert! Further data follows. Will
report.”

Headquarters has been notified by
Station.

Activate viewing screen on doggie
number thirty-eight.

He looked into the activated screen,

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

into the vast arena of space over
which the mechanical vision of that
doggie mech was ranging. Far and
far away at top magnification were
five small dots, coming in fast on a
course leading ten points below and
at an angle of thirty-tvfo degrees to
the Station.

He flicked a key, releasing thirty-
eight on proximity fuse control and
sending it plunging toward the dots.
He scanned the Station area map for
the positions of his other mechs.
Thirty-nine was missing — in the Sta-
tion for repair. The rest were avail-
able. He checked numbers forty
through forty-five and thirty-seven
through thirty to rendezvous on col-
lision course with enemy at seventy-
five thousand kilometers. Numbers
twenty to thirty to rendezvous at
fifty thousand kilometers.

Primary defense has been inaugu-
rated.

He turned back to the screen. Num-
ber thirty-eight, expendable in the
interests of gaining information, was
plunging towards the ships at top
acceleration under strains no living
flesh would have been able to endure.
But as yet the size and type of the
invaders was still hidden by distance.
A white light flashed abruptly from
the communications panel, announc-
ing that Sector Headquarters was
alerted and ready to talk. He cut in
audio.

“ Contact. Go ahead, Station J-
49C3.”

STEEL BROTHER

“Five ships,” he said. “Beyond
identification range. Comingin through
thirty-eight at ten point thirty-two.”

“Acknowledge,” the voice of Head-
quarters was level, precise, emotion-
less. “Five ships — thirty-eight — ten
— thirty-two. Patrol Twenty, passing
through your area at four hours dis-
tance, has been notified and will pro-
ceed to your station at once, arriving
in four hours, plus or minus twenty
minutes. Further assistance follows.
Will stand by here for your future
messages.”

The white light went out and he
turned away from communications
panel. On the screen, the five ships had
still not grown to identifiable propor-
tions, but for all practical purposes,
the preliminaries were over. He had
some fifteen minutes now during
which everything that could be done,
had been done.

Primary defense has been completed.

He turned away from the controls
and walked back to the bedroom,
where he dressed slowly and meticu-
lously in full black uniform. He
straightened his tunic, looking in the
mirror and stood gazing at himself for
a long moment. Then, hesitantly, al-
most as if against his will, he reached
out with one hand to a small gray
box on a shelf beside the mirror, opened
it, and took out the silver battle star
that the next few hours would entitle
him to wear.

It lay in his palm, the bright metal

113

winking softly up at him under the
reflection of the room lights and the
small movements of his hand. The lit-
tle cluster of diamonds in its center
sparked and ran the whole gamut of
their flashing colors. For several min-
utes he stood looking at it; then slowly,
gently, he shut it back up in its box
and went out, back to the control
room.

On the screen, the ships were now
large enough to be identified. They
were medium sized vessels, Jordan
noticed, of the type used most by the
most common species of raiders — that
same race which had orphaned him.
There could be no doubt about their
intentions, as there sometimes was
when some odd stranger chanced upon
the Frontier, to be regretfully de-
stroyed by men whose orders were to
take no chances. No, these were the
enemy, the strange, suicidal life form
that thrust thousands of attacks
yearly against the little human em-
pire, who blew themselves up when
captured and wasted a hundred ships
for every one that broke through the
guarding stations to descend on some
unprotected city of an inner planet and
loot it of equipment and machinery
that the aliens were either unwilling
or unable to build for themselves — a
contradictory, little understood and
savage race. These five ships would
make no attempt to parley.

But now, doggie number thirty-
eight had been spotted and the white
exhausts of guided missiles began to

, 114

streak toward the viewing screen. For
a few seconds, the little mech bucked
and tossed, dodging, firing defensively,
shooting down the missiles as they ap-
proached. But it was a hopeless fight
against those odds and suddenly one
of the streaks expanded to fill the
screen with glaring light.

And the screen went blank. Thirty-
eight was gone.

Suddenly realizing that he should
have been covering with observation
from one of the doggies further back,
Jordan jumped to fill his screens. He
brought the view from forty in on the
one that thirty-eight had vacated and
filled the two flanking screens with the
view from thirty-seven on his left and
twenty on his right. They showed his
first line of defense already gathered
at the seventy-five kilometer rendez-
vous and the fifty thousand kilometer
rendezvous still forming.

The raiders were decelerating now,,
and on the wall, the telltale for the
enemy’s detectors flushed a sudden
deep and angry purple as their in-
visible beams reached out and were
baffled by the detector screen he had
erected at a distance of forty thousand
kilometers in front of the Station.
They continued to decelerate, but the
blockage of their detector beams had
given them the approximate area of his
Station; and they corrected course,
swinging in until they were no more
than two points and ten degrees in
error. Jordan, his nervous fingers trem-
bling slightly on the keys, stretched

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

thirty-seven through thirty out in
depth and sent forty through forty-
five forward on a five-degree sweep to
attempt a circling movement.

The five dark ships of the raiders,
recognizing his intention, fell out of
their single file approach formation
to spread out and take a formation in
open echelon. They were already fir-
ing on the advancing doggies and tiny
streaks of light tattooed the black of
space around numbers forty through
forty-five.

Jordan drew a deep and ragged
breath and leaned back in his control
seat. For the moment there was noth-
ing for his busy fingers to do among
the control keys. His thirties must
wait until the enemy came to them;
since, with modern automatic gunnery
the body at rest had an advantage
over the body in motion. And it would
be some minutes before the forties
would be in attack position. He fum-
bled for a cigarette, keeping his eyes
on the screens, remembering the cau-
tion in the training manuals against
relaxation once contact with the en-
emy had been made.

But reaction was setting in.

From the first wild ringing com-
mand of the alarm until the present
moment, he had reacted automati-
cally, with perfection and precision,
as the drills had schooled him, as the
training manuals had impressed upon
him. The enemy had appeared. He
had taken measures for defense against

them. All that could have been done
had been done; and he knew he had
done it properly. And the enemy had
done what he had been told they
would do.

He was struck, suddenly, with the
deep quivering realization of the truth
in the manual’s predictions. It was so,

then. These inimical others, these
alien foes, were also bound by the
physical laws. They as well as he,
could move only within the rules of
time and space. They were shorn of
their mystery and brought down to
his level. Different and awful, they
might be, but their capabilities were
limited, even as his; and in a combat
such as the one now shaping up, their
inhumanness was of no account, for
the inflexible realities of the universe
weighed impartially on him and them
alike.

And with this realization, for the
first time, the old remembered fear
began to fall away like a discarded
garment. A tingle ran through him
and he found himself warming to the
fight as his forefathers had warmed
before him away back to the days
when man was young and the tiger
roared in the cool, damp jungle-dawn
of long ago. The blood-instinct was
in him; that and' something of the
fierce, vengeful joy with which a
hunted creature turns at last on its
pursuer. He would win. Of course he
would win. And in winning he would
at one stroke pay off the debt of blood
and fear -which the enemy had held

STEEL BROTHER

115

against him these fifteen years.

Thinking in this way, he leaned
back in his seat and the old memory
of the shattered city and of himself
running, running, rose up again
around him. But this time it was no
longer a prelude to terror, but fuel
for the kindling of his rage. These are
my fear, he thought, gazing unseeingly
at the five ships in the screens and I
will destroy them.

The phantasms of his memory
faded like smoke around him. He
dropped his cigarette into a disposal
slot on the arm of his seat, and leaned
forward to inspect the enemy posi-
tions.

They had spread out to force his
forties to circle wide, and those dog-
gies were now scattered, safe but in-
effective, waiting further directions.
What had been an open echelon for-
mation of the raiders was now a rag-
ged, widely dispersed line, with far too
much space between ships to allow
each to cover his neighbor.

For a moment Jordan was puzzled ;
and a tiny surge of fear of the un-
explicable rippled across the calm sur-
face of his mind. Then his brow
smoothed out. There was no need to
get panicky. The aliens’ maneuver
was not the mysterious tactic he had
half-expected it to be; but just what
it appeared, a rather obvious and
somewhat stupid move to avoid the
flanking movement he had been at-
tempting with his forties. Stupid —
because the foolish aliens had now

rendered themselves vulnerable to in-
terspersal by his thirties.

It was good news, rather than bad,
and his spirits leaped another notch.

He ignored the baffled forties, cir-
cling automatically on safety control
just beyond the ships’ effective aiming
range; and turned to the thirties, send-
ing them plunging toward the empty
areas between ships as you might
interlace the fingers of one hand with
another. Between any two ships there
would be a dead spot — a position
where a mech could not Ire fired on by
either vessel without also aiming at
its right- or left-hand companion. If
two or more doggies could be brought
safely to that spot, they could turn
and pour down the open lanes on
proximity control, their fuses primed,
their bomb loads activated, blind bull-
dogs of destruction.

One third, at least, should in this
way get through the defensive shelling
of the ships and track their dodging
prey to the atomic flare of a grim
meeting.

Smiling now in confidence, Jordan
watched his mechs approach the ships.
There was nothing the enemy could
do. They could not now tighten up
their formation without merely mak-
ing themselves a more attractive tar-
get ; and to disperse still further would
negate any chance in the future of
regaining a semblance of formation.

Carefully, his fingers played over
the keys, gentling his mechs into line
so that they would come as close as

possible to hitting their dead spots
simultaneously. The ships came on.

Closer the raiders came, and closer.
And then — bare seconds away from
contact with the line of approaching
doggies, white fire ravened in unison
from their stern tubes, making each
ship suddenly a black nugget in the
center of a blossom of flame. In unison,
they spurted forward, in sudden and
unexpected movement, bringing their
dead spots to and past the line of
seeking doggies, leaving them behind.

Caught for a second in stunned sur-
prise, Jordan sat dumb and motion-
less, staring at the screen. Then, swift
in his anger, his hands flashed out over
the keys, blasting his mechs to a cruel,
shuddering halt, straining their metal
sinews for the quickest and most
abrupt about face and return. This
time he would catch them from be-
hind. This time, going in the same
direction as the ships, the mechs could
not be dodged. For what living thing
could endure equal strains with cold
metal?

But there was no second attempt on
the part of the thirties, for as each
bucked to its savage halt, the rear
weapons of the ships reached out in
unison, and each of the blasting mechs,
that had leaped forward so confi-
dently, flared up and died like little
candles in the dark.

Numb in the grip of icy failure,
Jordan sat still, a ramrod figure staring
at the two screens that spoke so elo-

quently of his disaster— and the one
dead screen where the view from
thirty-seven had been, that said noth-
ing at all. Like a man in a dream, he
reached out his right hand and cut in
the final sentinel, the watchdog, that
mech that circled closest to the Sta-
tion. In one short breath his strong
first line was gone, and the enemy
rode, their strength undiminished,
floating in toward his single line of
twenties at fifty thousand with the
defensive screen a mere ten thousand
kilometers behind them.

Training was strong. Without hesi-
tation his hands went out over the
keys and the doggies of the twenties
surged forward, trying for contact
with the enemy in an area as far from
the screen as possible. But, because
they were moving in on an opponent
relatively at rest, their courses were
the more predictable on the enemy’s
calculators and the disadvantage was
theirs. So it was that forty minutes
later three ships of the alien rode clear
and unthreatened in an area where
two of their mates, the forties and all
of the thirties were gone.

The ships were, at this moment,
fifteen thousand kilometers from the
detector screen.

Jordan looked at his handiwork.
The situation was obvious and the
alternatives undeniable. He had twenty
doggies remaining, but he had neither
the time to move them up beyond the
screen, nor the room to maneuver
them in front of it. The only answer

116

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE -FICTION

STEEL BROTHER

117

was to pull his screen back. But to
pull the .screen back would be to indi-
cate, by its shrinkage and the direction
of its withdrawal, the position of his
Station clearly enough for the guided
missiles of the enemy to seek him out;
and once the Station was knocked out,
the doggies were directionless, .im-
potent.

Yet, if he did nothing, in a few min-
utes the ships would touch and pene-
trate the detector screen and his Sta-
tion, the nerve center the aliens were
seeking, would lie naked and revealed
in their detectors. \

He had lost. The alternatives totaled
to the same answer, to defeat. In the
inattention of a moment, in the
smoke of a cigarette, the first blind
surgeof self-confidence and the thought-
less halting of his by-passed doggies
that had allowed the ships’ calculators
to find them stationary for a second
in a predictable area, he had failed.
He had given away, in the error of his
pride, the initial advantage. He had
lost. Speak it softly, speak it gently,
for his fault was the fault of one
young and untried. He was defeated.

And in the case of defeat, the ac-
tions prescribed by the manual was
stern and clear. The memory of the
instructions tolled in his mind like the
unvarying notes of a funeral bell.

“When, in any conflict, the forces of
the enemy have obtained a position of
advantage such that it is no longer pos-
sible to maintain the anonymity of the
Station’s position, the commandant of

118

the Station is required to perform one
final duty. Knowing that the Station
will shortly be destoyed and that this
will render all remaining tnechs in-
nocuous to enemy forces, the comman-
dant is commanded to relinquish control
of these meclis, and to place them with
fuses primed on proximity control, in
order that, even without the Station ,
they may be enabled to automatically
pursue and attempt to destroy those
forces of the enemy that approach within
critical range of their proximity fuse.”

Jordan looked at his screens. Out at
forty thousand kilometers, the de-
tector screen was beginning to lu-
minesce slightly as^fhe detectors of the
ships probed it at shorter range. To
make the manual’s order effective, it
would have to be pulled back to at
least half that distance; and there,
while it would still hide the Station, it
would give the enemy his approximate
location. They would then fire blindly,
but with cunning and increasing
knowledge and it would be only a
matter of time before they hit. After
that — only the blind doggies, quiver-
ing, turning and trembling through all
points of the stellar compass in their
thoughtless hunger for prey. One or
two of these might gain a revenge as
the ships tried to slip past them and
over the Line; but. Jordan would not be
there to know it:

But there was no alternative — even
if duty had left him one. Like stran-
gers, his hands rose from the board

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

and stretched out over the keys that
would turn the doggies loose. His
fingers dropped and rested upon them
—light touch on smooth polished
coolness.

But he could not press them down.

He sat with his arms outstretched,
as if in supplication, like one of his
primitive forebearers before some an-
cient altar of death. For his will had
failed him and there was no denying
now his guilt, and his failure. For the
battle had turned in his short few
moments of inattention, and his
underestimation of the enemy that
had seduced him into halting his
thirties without thinking. He knew;
and through the memory bank— if
that survived — the Force would know.
In his neglect, in his refusal to avail
himself of the experience of his prede-
cessors, he was guilty.

Aud yet, he could not press the
keys. He could not die properly — in
the execution of his duly — the cold,
correct phrase of the official reports.
For a wild rebellion surged through his
young body, an instinctive denial of
the end that stared him so undeniably
in the face. Through vein and sinew
and nerve, it raced, opposing and
blocking the dictates of training, the
logical orders of his upper mind. It
was too soon, it was not fair, he had
not been given his chance to profit by
experience. One more opportunity
was all he needed, one more try to re-
deem himself.

But the rebellion passed and left

STEEL BROTHER

him shaken, weak. There was no deny-
ing reality. And now, a new shame
came to press upon him, for he thought
of the three alien vessels breaking
through, of another city in flaming
ruins, and another child that would
run screaming from his destroyers.
The thought rose up in him, and he
writhed internally, torn by his own
indecisions. Why couldn’t he act? It
made no difference to him. What
would justification and the redeeming
of error mean to him after he was
dead?

And he moaned a little, softly to
himself, holding his hands outstretched
above the keys, but could not press
them down.

And then hope came. For suddenly,
rising up out of the rubble of his mind
came the memory of the Intelligence
man’s words once again, and his own
near-pursuit of insanity. He, Jordan,
could not bring himself to expose him-
self to the enemy, not even if the
method of exposure meant possible
protection for the Inner Worlds. But
the man who had held this Station
before him, who had died as he was
about to die, must have been faced
with the same necessity for self-sacri-
fice. And those last-minute memories
of his decision would be in the memory
bank, waiting for the evocation of
Jordan’s mind.

Here was hope at last. He would
remember, would embrace the insanity
he had shrunk from. He would re-
member and be Waskewicz, not Jor-

119

dan. He would be Waskewicz and un-
afraid ; though it was a shameful thing
to do. Had there been one person, one
memory among all living humans,
whose image he could have evoked to
place in opposition to the images of
the three dark ships, he might have
managed by himself. But there had
been no one close to him since the day
of the city raid.

His mind reached back into the
memory bank, reached back to the last
of Waskewicz’s memories. He re-
membered.

Of the ten ships attacking, six were
down. Their ashes strewed the void
and the remaining four rode warily,
spread widely apart for maximum
safety, sure of victory, but wary of
this hornet’s nest which might still
have some stings yet unexpended.
But the detector screen was back to
its minimum distance for effective
concealment and only five doggies re-
mained poised like blunt arrows be-
hind it. He — Waskewicz — sat, hunched
before the control board, his thick and
hairy hands lying softly on the prox- '

120

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

imity keys.

“Drift in,” he said, speaking to the
ships, which were cautiously approach-
ing the screen. “Drift in, you. Drift!”

His lips were skinned back over his
teeth in a grin — but he did not mean
it. It was an automatic grimace, reflex
to the tenseness of his waiting. He
would lure them on until the last mo-
ment, draw them as close as possible
to the automatic pursuit mechanisms
of the remaining doggies, before pull-
ing back the screen.

“Drift in,” he said.

They drifted in. Behind the screen
he aimed his doggies, pointing each
one of four at a ship and the remaining
one generally at them all. They drifted
in.

They touched.

His fingers slapped the keys. The
screen snapped back until it barely
covered the waiting doggies. And the
doggies stirred, on proximity, their
pursuit mechs activated, now blind
and terrible fully armed, ready to at-
tack in senseless directness anything
that came close enough.

And the first shells from the advanc-
ing ships began to probe the general
area of the Station asteroid.

Waskewicz sighed, pushed himself
back from the controls and stood up,
turning away from the screens. It was
over. Done. All finished. For a mo-
ment he stood irresolute; then, walk-
ing over to the dispenser on the wall,
dialed for coffee and drew it, hot into a
disposable cup. He lit a cigarette and

stood waiting, smoking and drinking
the coffee.

The Station rocked suddenly to the
impact of a glancing hit on the aster-
oid. He staggered and slopped some
coffee on his boots, but kept his feet.
He took another gulp from the cup,
another drag on the cigarette. The
Station shook again, and the lights
dimmed. He crumpled the cup and
dropped it in the disposal slot. He
dropped the cigarette on the steel
floor, ground it beneath his boot sole;
and walked back to the screen and
leaned over for it for a final look.

The lights went out. And memory
ended.

The present returned to Jordan and
he stared about him a trifle wildly.
Then he felt hardness beneath his
fingers and forced himself to look
down.

The keys were depressed. The screen
was back. The doggies were on prox-
imity. He stared at his hand as if he
had never known it before, shocked at
its thinness and the lack of soft down
on its back. Then, slowly, fighting
reluctant neck muscles, he forced
himself to look up and into the viewing
screen.

And the ships were there, but the
ships were drawing away.

He stared, unable to believe his
eyes, and half-ready to believe any-
thing else. For the invaders had
turned and the flames from their tails
made it evident that they were making

STEEL BROTHER

121

away into outer space at their maxi-
mum bearable acceleration, leaving
him alone and unharmed. He shook
his head to dear away tire false vision
from the screen before him, but it re-
mained, denying its falseness. The
miracle for which his instincts had
held him in check had come — in the
moment in which he had borrowed
strength to deny it.

His eyes searched the screens in
wonder. And then, far down in one
corner of the watch dog’s screen and so
distant still that they showed only as
pips on the wide expanse, he saw the
shape of his miracle. Coming up from
inside of the Line under maximum
bearable acceleration were six gleam-
ing fish-shapes that would dwarf his
doggies to minnows — the battleships
of Patrol Twenty. And he realized,
with the dawning wonder of the re-
prieved, that the conflict, which had
seemed so momentary while he was
fighting it had actually lasted the
four hours necessary to bring the
Patrol up to his aid.

The realization that he was now safe
washed over him like a wave and he
was conscious of a deep thankfulness
swelling up within him. It swelled up
and out, pushing aside the lonely fear
and desperation of his last few min-
utes, filling him instead with a relief
so all-encompassing and profound that
there was no anger left in him and no
hate 1 — not even for the enemy. It was
like being born again.

Above him on the communications

122

panel, the white message light was
blinking. He cut in on the speaker
with a steady hand and the dispas-
sionate, official voice of the Patrol
sounded over his head.

“Patrol Twenty to Station. Twenty
to Station. Come in Station. Are you
all right?”

He pressed the transmitter key.

“Station to Twenty. Station to
Twenty. No damage to report. The
Station is unharmed.”

“Glad to hear it, Station. We will
not pursue. We are decelerating now ’ ;
and will drop all ships on your field in
half an hour. That is all.”

“Thank you, Twenty. The field
will be clear and ready for you. Land
at will. That is all.”

His hand fell away from the key
and the message light winked out. In
unconscious imitation of Waskewicz’s
memory he pushed himself back from
the controls, stood up, turned and
walked to the dispenser in the wall,
where he dialed for and received a cup
of coffee. He lit a cigarette and stood
as the other had stood, smoking and
drinking. He had won.

And reality came back to him with a
rush.

For he looked down at his hand and
saw the cup of coffee. He drew in on
the cigarette and felt the hot smooth-
ness of it deep in his lungs. And terror
took him twisting by the throat.

He had won? He had- done nothing.

The enemy ships had fled not from
him, but from the Patrol; and it was

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

Waskewicz, Waskewicz, who had taken
the controls from his hands at the
crucial moment. It was Waskewicz
who had saved the day, not he. It was
the memory bank. The memory bank
and Waskewicz!

The control room rocked about him.
He had been betrayed. Nothing was
won. Nothing was conquered. It was
no friend that had broken at last
through his lonely shell to save him,
but the mind-sucking figment of
memory-domination sanity. The
memory bank and Waskewicz had
seized him in their grasp.

He threw the coffee container from
him and made himself stand upright.
He threw the cigarette down and
ground it beneath his boot. White-
hot, from the very depths of his being,
a wild anger blazed and consumed him.
Puppet, said the mocking voice of his
conscience, whispering in his ear.
Puppet!

Dance, Puppet! Dance to the tune of
the twitching strings!

“No!” he yelled. And, borne on the
white-hot tide of his rage, the all-
consuming rage that burnt the last
trace of fear from his heart like dross
from the molten steel, he turned to
face his tormentor, hurling his mind
backward, back into the life of Waske-
wicz, prisoned in the memory bank.

Back through the swirling tide of
memories he raced, hunting a point of
contact, wanting only to come to grips
with his predecessor, to stand face to
face with Waskewicz. Surely, in all his

STEEL BROTHER

years at the Station, the other must
sometime have devoted a thought to
the man who must come after him.
Let Jordan just find that point, there
where the influence was strongest,
and settle the matter, for sanity or in-
sanity, for shame or pride, once and
for all.

“Hi, Brother!”

The friendly words splashed like
cool water on the white blaze of his
anger. He — Waskewicz — stood in

front of the bedroom mirror and his
face- looked out at the man who was
himself, and who yet was also Jordan.

“Hi, Brother!” he said. “Whoever
and wherever you may be. Hi !”

Jordan looked out through the eyes
of Waskewicz, at the reflected face of
Waskewicz; and it was a friendly face,
the face of a man like himself.

“This is what they don’t tell you,”
said Waskewicz. “This is what they
don’t teach in training — the message
that, sooner or later, every stationman
leaves for the guy who comes after
him.

“This is the creed of the Station.
You are not alone. No matter what
happens, you are not alone. Out on the
rim of the empire, facing the unknown
races and the endless depths of the
universe, this is the one thing that
will keep you from all harm. As long
as you remember it, nothing can af-
fect you, neither attack, nor defeat,
nor death. Light a screen on your
outermost doggie and turn the magni-

123

fication up as far as it will go. Away kinship when for your personal self
out at the limits of your vision you the light has gone out forever, and
can see the doggie of another Station, what was individual of you is nothing
of another man who holds the Line any more but cold ashes drifting in
beside you. All along the Frontier, the the eternity of space. We are with you
Outpost Stations stand, forming a link and of you, and you are not alone. I,
of steel to guard the Inner Worlds and who was once Waskewicz, and am
the little people there. They have now part of the Station, leave this
their lives and you have yours; and message for you, as it was left to me
yours is to stand on guard. by the man who kept this guard before

"It is not easy to stand on guard; me, and as you will leave it in your
and no man can face the universe turn to the man who follows you, and
alone. But — you are not alone! All so on down the centuries until we have
those who at this moment keep the become an elder race and no longer
Line, are with you; and all that have need our shield of brains and steel.”
ever kept the Line, as well. For this is “Hi, Brother! You are not alone!”
our new immortality, we who guard

the Frontier, that we do not stop with And so, when the six ships of Patrol
our deaths, but live on in the Station Twenty came drifting in to their land-
we have kept. We are in its screens, ing at the Station, the man who
its controls, in its memory bank, in the waited to greet them had more than
very bone and sinew of its steel body, the battle star on his chest to show he
We are the station, your steel brother was a veteran. For he had done more
that fights and lives and dies with than win a battle. He had found his
you and welcomes you at last to our soul.

THE END

THE ANALYTICAL LABORATORY

Being short of space, we will simply give the report on the November 1951
issue:

Place

Title

Author

Points

1 .

The Hunting Season

Frank M. Robinson

1.57

2.

Iceworld (Part 2)

Hal Clement

2.23

3.

Implode and Peddle

H. B. Fyfe

2.71

4.

To Explain Mrs. Thompson

Philip Latham

3.35

The Editor.

124

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

IV'* ‘ZJ-itSV

Any astronomer can calculate
the Escape Velocity for any planet
whose characteristics he knows. But
there is another concept of Escape
Velocity that can't be calculated—
yet:

-corners of the cabinet; and it looked
like a small rocket — which it almost
was.

But its fuel was not alcohol and
liquid oxygen. Its fuel was a powder,
the dust of a metal, heavier than the
plutonium or U-235 of the first atom
bombs — but, like plutonium, synthetic.
The small flame, jabbing down straight
as a pencil from a vent at the lower
end of the cylinder, glared like a frag-
ment of the sun, and not unnaturally
so; for the power of the A-bomb, too
violent in that original form to propel
anything except itself into Hell, here
had been tamed to a stream of tenu-
ous, speeding gases and other fission
products that gave a steady thrust.

The room was dark, save for the
round bright eye of the window and its
enormous, wavering counterpart on
the opposite wall; and the latter was
abruptly eclipsed as Hiller bent again
to the window. He puffed his pipe,
which had gone out, his gaunt features
seeming to soften even in the harsh
light. He loved this 'thing as a master
violinist loves a Stradivarius. He was
not its sole inventor, of course — no one
could have been in these days when
knowledge of physics had become so
specialized — but he had done more of
the thinking, more of the actual work,
than any of the others here in this
government laboratory.

Now he stepped aside, motioning
the Army man — Hiller had forgotten
his name — who had been sent to tenta-
tively verify his report of the success

of the project, to look through the
window.

The Army man’s bulldog face
moved into the glare, and Hiller
touched a dial on the cabinet’s wall.
The little flame lengthened, producing
thrust just as the exhaust of the sim-
plest skyrocket does — by kick or re-
coil — but the wreckage of broken
atoms, which formed the substance of
the flame, was far thinner than the
exhaust of a skyrocket, and incon-
ceivably hotter and faster moving.

The jet motor surged upward a few
inches, straining at the movable parts
of its test frame which were tethered
by heavy springs. A meter needle at
Hiller’s elbow swung from numeral 4
to 7.

“The motor weighs just over three
•pounds, fuel and all,” Hiller said, in
the darkness. “Its maximum thrust is
seven pounds, which means that it can
lift more than twice its own weight,
vertically. It can go on doing this
without exhausting its energy in a few
minutes, as chemical rockets always
do. Six ounces of fuel are enough to
give it full power for eight hours — ”

He spoke rather absently. Though
he was a government scientist — what-
ever that meant — he felt distinctly
separate in spirit from the shrewd-
faced man, two-thirds his own age,
who stood peering into the cabinet.
Hiller’s work was part of the national
defense project; yet by a quirk not
uncommon among scientists — govern-

126

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-EICTION

ment scientists not excepted — he had
scarcely thought about weapons of war
as he had toiled over the atomic jet
motor these past months. His mind
had ever been on another objective,
beyond the thought of aircraft either
military or civil. It was a goal — some
called it a dream — that he had reached
for during most of his life.

And it was at last within grasp.

Hiller sighed, retreated mentally into
the familiar details of his “dream.”
How much speed could be built up by
a motor that gave a thrust more than
double its'own weight, a motor that
carried an eight-hour fuel supply to
provide an acceleration that could be
constant yet never too great for the
human body to endure? The old V-2
rockets, with a comparable thrust-to-
weight ratio, had attained a velocity
of a mile per second in less than two
minutes — but by then their crude
chemical fuel was spent, and their
speed limit reached.

Ev had no such limitation on fuel;
so Ev had no such limit on speed.

What would your velocity be after
thirty minutes or an hour of such
gradual acceleration? Too much for
comfort, if you were moving through
air — but if you were traveling where
there was no air to retard your flight?

Some called it a dream —

Hiller thought of the so-called canals
of Mars, of its dead deserts that could
live again, of colonies of Earthmen
humming in great plastic domes be-
neath Phobos and Deimos. He thought

of Venus, Jupiter and the other planets,
and of the thrilling possibility of con-
tacting an alien culture. And he
thought of the concordant Man that
must slowly, but very surely, emerge
from this great adventure. For with
the struggle, the pioneering, a cultural
contact — well met or ill — must come
a new perspective of Earth, indivisible
in its humanity, as one nation among
the stars.

<b

The visitor’s lips pursed; he bent
again into the glare. Perhaps, Hiller
thought, he was visualizing the vast
speeds, the wide range of action that
such a thrust and low fuel load would
make possible. Or perhaps he was
phrasing the report he would shortly
make to his superiors: Hiller has tipped
the scales. There is no longer the question
of a balance of military power. We now
have reasonable assurance of winning
the war. There remains only to allow it
to start — •

Hiller snapped on the lights, twisted
the dial that brought Ev to rest in its
frame. As he puffed his pipe alight, he
slowly answered the few questions
that were put to him. His visitor and
he did have this laconic quality in
common, this stinginess with words,
this private visualizing.

“Can the radiation shields be made
light enough to be carried by planes?
Will they be effective enough to pro-
tect the crews? ”

“I think so,” Hiller said. “Most of
the radiation will be thrown aft with

EV

127

the jet exhaust, where it can’t harm
the crews anyway. And we’re working
on a new alloy of lead. A single bulk-
head of it, between motors and cabin,
should absorb or reflect any stray
energy — ” .

He hesitated, then said with no
particular inflection, “Apart from
military considerations, you know, Ev
is the answer to space travel.”

“Ev?”

Hiller smiled slightly. “ A nickname
some of us have given the motor. Short
for ‘escape velocity.’”

The Army man pursed his lips
again; it was apparent that he wished
to say nothing, but that he felt Hiller’s
position warranted a reply of some
sort. “Yes,” he said at last, “it would
seem to be. I wouldn’t say, however,
that space travel is apart from military
considerations — ” He stopped; that
sort of reply was not indicated.

“Moon bases for guided missiles,”
Hiller said heavily. “Satellite stations,
raining atom bombs. That’s about it,
eh?”

The Army man gathered up his hat
and brief case. “Those seem a little
fantastic for the present, Mr. Hiller.
But such uses for the motor will no
doubt receive attention.”

“Do you believe that this motor
would win a war,” Hiller said, almost
gently, “assuming that we found our-
selves in one? Granted that Ev could
deliver . atomic warheads with such
complicated evasive action that inter-

THE

ception would be impossible, do you
honestly believe that, no matter how
hard and fast we struck when the lid
blew off, we could even begin to escape
what would be thrown at us? Could
anything — anyone — win that war?”
The Army man turned to the door.
“I have enough information for now.
Thank you for your time. An examin-
ing board will check over the motor in
detail tomorrow. Good night.”

“I’m sure they’ll be satisfied,” said
Hiller.

“Do you know,” he went on, “why
space travel has been impossible until
now — and why it is possible now?”
The bulldog face didn’t smile. “Ev.”
“Test rockets have risen, risen
strongly — but have always fallen back
to destruction. You know that.”

“I know that no motor has been
developed that can carry sufficient fuel
to enable it to attain escape velocity—
until now, of course.”

Hiller puffed in and out through his
pipe, making little connected mush-
rooms of smoke that drifted toward '
the ceiling. “Tell me, sir: Has it ever
seemed to you that the civilization of
Mankind is a test rocket rising again
and again from the level of savagery — -
yet somehow never able to apply suffi-
cient wisdom to attain escape ve-
locity?”

The Army man put on his hat; it
shadowed his eyes and the expression
in them. He said tonelessly, “Good
night, Mr. Hiller.”

END

128

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

STAR-LINKED

BY H. B. FYFE

A man who's been to the stars
cannot easily accept complete sever
ance from the far , high, and exciting
adventure. To do nothing is to die
to be of no use is worse for a Man!

Illustrated by van Dongen

The walls of the small communica-
tions office seemed to have been
erected mainly to hold panels of dials
and switches. One end of the cubicle
was occupied by the control desk,
banked high with rows of toggle
switches and push buttons labeled
with the names and code numbers of
stars or planets at which telebeams
might be aimed by automatic mecha-
nisms. There were also more complex
controls, for use by the operator in
contacting worlds infrequently called
from this interstellar station on Pho-
bos.

In the right-hand rear corner was a
simpler desk with a microphone and a

single telescreen for a stand-by opera-
tor. Of the remaining space, the best
part ' was taken up by Harry Red-
kirk’s chrome and leather swivel chair.

“Sorry, Oberhof,” Redkirk was
saying. “I can’t put your man through
direct from Luna to Centauri IV. It’s
behind its sun.”

“Any relay possible?” asked the
dark-haired man watching him — ap-
parently — from the large screen at
Redkirk’s eye level beyond the desk.

This screen was flanked by eight
smaller ones arranged in vertical pairs
and identified by association with the
several transmitters of the station.
Screens One and Two went with

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‘'Beam A,” and so on. At the mo-
ment, Six and Eight, to Redkirk’s
right, were alive with outgoing, previ-
ously transcribed, routine messages.
The voices, at super speed, were high
and gabbling.

“I’ll try through one of the Wolf
359 planets,” said Redkirk.

He switched on the automatic caller
and punched the button that would
cause the beam to be aimed at one of
Sol’s closer neighbors across about
eight light-years of space. There was
no need to worry about adjusting for
the position of any planet not hidden
by the star; the best beam achieved
by man would spread at that distance
to blanket the whole planetary sys-
tem. Even subspace waves had their
limitations, although Redkirk’s job
was made possible by the fact that
their time lag at that distance was
imperceptible.

Redkirk’s face became intent as'the
answer bleated in from Wolf 359. He
made manually the last fine adjust-
ments to tune out a slight fuzziness
left in the signal by the automatic
correctors, and looked up at the screen
from which he had temporarily dis-
placed the Lunar operator.

He was thin enough to seem tall
even while sitting down. The effect
was increased by a leanness in his
features; he had a long, pointed chin,
arched nose, and hollow cheeks.
Straight yellow hair was combed back
from his high forehead, along the left
side of which ran a long, narrow scar.

130

Except for this white mark, his face |
was tanned to the dusty gold shade
often seen in blond people who do not
burn red.

Had it not been for the tan, anyone «
examining him at the moment would
have thought him a sick man. The
lines from nose to the comers of his '
mouth were deep grooves. If the
wrinkles around his eyes suggested
laughter, the frown-creases between
them spoke of pain.

Here he conies, thought Redkirk, as i
he brought into perfect focus on his .j
main screen the image of a nonhuman.

The distant operator was chunky, ,3
tentacled, and rounded, with several
hooded eyes. Behind him, the scene
was flat and shadowless, which in this - 1
case meant to Redkirk that it was as
dim as might be preferred by beings
in the system of an M 8 red star.

He keyed off a sequence of universal 1
signals. After a moment, the tentacled
one replied with a similar standard 1
message.

“He can get them,” Redkirk told
the Lunar operator as soon as he got ■;
him back on the screen. “ Get your I
party on!”

A few minutes later, he had an
Earthman on screen One and another j
from the Centaurian colonies showing
on Two — the beam picked up by his
receiver and the one he was trans- ,
mitting. He listened a while to make
sure everything meshed, and caught
fragments of a conversation about

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION I

something or other to be sent back to
Sol in the next interstellar ship.

Redkirk flicked a finger at the
Lunar man as the latter withdrew
from the mam screen to attend to
other affairs. Then he leaned back in
the chrome and leather chair, thinking
idly of the years he had spent piloting
such ships as the two men were dis-
cussing.

Oh, well, he thought, I had it for a
while and I shouldn’t gripe at having to
stay here spinning around Mars. Many
a good man would like nothing better
than to have a shift at the main inter-
stellar station of the Solar System.

Demand for the job did not worry
him, however, for he recalled that the
company owed it to him for the rest
of his life if he chose to keep it.

He had been on the desk about an
hour of his four-hour shift, during
which the tiny satellite would move
around the spaceward side of Mars
and back to intersect the orbit ahead
of the planet. In another hour, Johnny
would come in with coffee, and two
hours after that, Gamier would re-
lieve him.

“Not that I’m anxious about it,”
he murmured. “I’d stay a day at a
time, if they’d let me.”

He switched the main screen to a
view through the exterior scanner and
focused in a view of Mars. Half of the
mottled red planet showed above the
jagged horizon of Phobos. He knew
that if he watched the ruddy disk
long enough, it would give the impres-

STAR-LINKED

sion of rotating backward upon its
axis. The speed of the tiny moon was
such that i-t made better than three
revolutions in a Martian day. Red-
kirk manipulated the controls to scan
the sky, and other viewers set along a
band about the satellite came into
action. Against the black void, the
stars shone hotly, watching, waiting,
drawing his consciousness out of real-
ity toward them.

A series of beeps signaled a call from
the Lunar station. Redkirk snapped
out of his reverie and replied.

“ Got a nice one this time,” Oberhof
told him. “Mr. Secretary Rawlins, of
the Solar State Department, wants to
talk to Ambassador Morelli.”

“ All right,” said Redkirk agreeably.
“Where is he?”

“Only aboard the space liner Iris,
SL-3-525, which is presumably” — he
referred to a note before him — “about
three-quarters of the way to Procyon
right now.”

“Oh, fine!” groaned Redkirk, roll-
ing his eyes upward. “How about
sending the message to be recorded on
Procyon V and held for Morelli’s
arrival? ”

Oberhof grimaced.

“That’s what I said. No go. He
wants him in person, so they can use a
scrambled signal and exchange dope
in private.”

Redkirk chuckled.

“ How private can you get, shouting
for light-years through space in this

131

day and age? Well, I’ll see if I can
pick them up.”

He switched beam C to the direction
of Procyon, expecting little trouble in
sweeping the volume of space con-
taining the ship. Unless the latter had
moved fantastically off course, the
spread of the beam would catch it as
well as the planets of Procyon. The
trouble was that a moving ship in
subspace drive often had difficulty in
picking up signals sent after it by a
process resembling its own method of
propulsion. Any little maladjustment
or interference, even a thin cloud of
cosmic dust, was enough to prevent
reception.

Redkirk set a tape to beeping out a
repetitive call signal, and glanced up
to meet Oberhof’s eye.

“If it doesn’t work,” he promised,
“I’ll get Procyon V to tell them to
call me.”

“Fair enough,” said Oberhof. “I’ll
let you know if His Nibs objects to
doing it that way.”

“Any time,” said Redkirk. “I’ll be
out of touch with you for a couple of
hours, soon, but you can pick me up
again when we swing around Mars.”

The Lunar operator hesitated, and
the other saw his shoulder move as if
he had dropped his hand from the
cut-off switch.

“What kind of shift do you pull?”
he asked Redkirk. “I haven’t been on
the station long enough to know
everybody yet.”

“About four hours, once in sixteen.

Actually, it’s figured according to the
time it takes Phobos to get around its

1

orbit. Pretty near to what you pull,
isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” said Oberhof, “but I heard
that you . . . uh, you used to be a
pilot, didn’t you?”

Redkirk grinned, and some of the
traces of pain disappeared from his
thin face.

“You mean you’ve been hearing
stories of how I piled up a Martian i
liner on the Lake of the Sun?”

Oberhof managed to look polite and
curious at the same time.

“Well . . . they say you got it
pretty bad, and being it was median- '
ical failure, you could have a pension.”

“So why do I work at Phobos?” k
finished Redkirk. “But why not? A l
man’s got to do something.”

The Lunar operator seemed about
to ask further questions, but manners >'
got the better of interest, and he
switched off after a few aimless re- ;i
marks.

Redkirk tried the ship’s code signal
at intervals, but failed to get an an-
swer.

“ They wouldn’t leave their receiver
off out there,” he muttered to himself.

“I must be-running into some dust or
other interference.”

He had to put the problem aside
when a call boomed up from the sur-
face of Mars. The Solar Exploration
Department, in the person of the re-
gional office in Sand City — now be-

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

neath the position of Phobos — wanted
to contact its current expedition on
Pluto.

Redkirk ran his finger down the row
of buttons marking beam settings for
Solar System bodies, found “Pluto,”
and put out an automatically aimed
call.

Within the planetary system, the
possible error due to the mechanism’s
not precisely matching the motion of
the planet was trifling, and he had an
answer coming back before he had
time to think about any correction.

“ Your headquarters on Mars wants
to talk,” he told the square-faced man
who appeared on his main screen.

The latter grimaced slightly, then
nodded as if resigned to wasting time
that might be better employed in the
long overlooked task of studying the
frigid planet.

“Put them through,” he said. “If
they’re willing to talk to the assistant
chief, I’ll try to tell them what they
want to hear. Tell them you have
Hodges; the boss is out on the ice.”

Redkirk checked the Martian oper-
ator, and presently had a two-way
conversation flowing through Three
and Four. Seeing that the relay of the
series of routine messages through Six
and Eight had been completed, leav-
ing those screens blank, he switched
off his C and D beams. Except for a
few minutes when he had to arrange
film recording of more such messages
from some asteroid stations to be re-
transmitted to Martian townships as

STAR-LINKED

Phobos circled into a favorable posi-
tion for it, he listened in to the beam
from Pluto.

The report was weighted with sta-
tistics and technical requisitions until
the square-faced Hodges withdrew
from the screen in order to show his<
superiors an example of the party’s
boring toward the planet’s surface
through ice and frozen gases.

Redkirk followed with eager inter-
est the process of thermite-drilling a
well down through strata of congealed
substances. The film recording of the
first blast revealed an unearthly kalei-
doscope of colors on the dark surface
of the planet from whose position Sol
was merely a bright star. Then, arti-
ficial lights showed the spacesuited
figures preparing for further penetra-
tion. Subsequent scenes displayed
samples of the walls as the passage
probed downward.

Redkirk was sorry when the direc-
tors on Mars were brought up to date
with a view of the bottom of the dig-
ging. Switching off after the commu-
nication had been completed, he real-
ized that for a quarter of an hour he
had forgotten where he was.

“Comfortable little hole, though,”
he murmured, gazing about at his
eight-by-ten office. “Lot warmer than
Pluto.”

The quiet sough of the air-condi-
tioning unit had heightened his imagi-
nation of nonexistent, freezing blasts
of wind whipping across the chill
waste on the screen. He decided he

132

133

was just as happy to hear Johnny
clattering coffee cups in the outer
office.

A moment later, his young assistant
thrust his head inside.

“Got time for coffee, Harry?” he
asked.

“Fill ’er up!” called Redkirk. “I’ve
just been talking to Pluto, and I need
something to warm my bones.”

Johnny brought in the coffee and
sat with his on the corner of the
stand-by desk after handing Redkirk
a full cup.

“Much doing?” he asked.

“Nothing special,” answered his
chief. “Except one for a spaceship
almost to Procyon. I can't pick them
up.”

He thought a moment, savoring the
hot liquid.

“Johnny,” he directed, “look up
the Iris in the Solarian Register, and
see if her code signal is really . . . uh
. . . SL-3-525. Maybe Luna didn’t
have it right.”

The youth took down a volume
from the shelf of such reference books
and leafed through it, holding his
coffee cup in one hand. When he found
the ship on the list, the call signal
was correct.

“Then I’m just not hitting her,”
said Redkirk. “Luna won’t be on our
necks for a while, till we come out
from behind Mars, but I’d like to have
something to tell Qberhof by then.”

“ Why don’t you relay through some

Procyon planet?”

“Oh, there’s some big jet on our
end. Oberhof thinks it’s diplomatic
and secret.”

He frowned over the piroblem until
Johnny went out to refill their cups.
Deciding that he would contact
Procyon only as a last resort, Redkirk
pressed the button that would aim
his A beam at Pluto.

“ Could you do me a little favor? ”
he greeted the square-faced Hodges
when the latter appeared.

“ Sure,” said the explorer woodenly.
“Want me to run down to the corner
for a beer or a blonde? ”

Redkirk repressed a grin, realizing
vaguely what a lonely life the other
was leading at the moment, and ex-
plained his situation.

“ Either they’re not able to pick up
my signal,” he concluded, “or some-
thing is screening me out. Remember
last month when you had trouble
getting Phobos because a flock of as-
teroids distorted your beam? ”

“ Well, I’ll see what I can do,”
promised Hodges. “Don't forget — I
haven’t the power you have at that
big station.”

“If you can just get them to call
me,” said Redkirk, “it will tell what
the score is.”

The man on Pluto nodded and faded
out. Five or ten minutes went by
before he reappeared. His broad face
showed a trace of excitement.

“By golly, I picked up a weak an-
swer!” he exclaimed. “I can just

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

about focus a blurry image. What do
you want me to tell them? ”

“Have them give me a call,” di-
rected Redkirk.

He waited, scanning the instru-
ments that would report any reception
too faint to appear as sound or pic-
ture. One needle, after a while, wa-
vered reluctantly. That was all.

Fie adjusted the same antenna for
Pluto, as a check, and Hodges came
in clear and strong.

“I can’t pick them up,” said Red-
kirk. “Now, listen, and tell me if you
can do this — call the Lunar station
and let them know you have the Iris.
Then relay if they can’t catch her
signal. I’m out of it both ways, at
least till Phobos swings further around
Mars.” *

He sat back after Hodges had faded
out, grinning at the feeling of having
pulled strings all around the System.
He doubted that Oberhof could pick
up the ship’s beam; whatever was
damping it before it reached Phobos
would probably take care of Earth
also.

In a few minutes, he discovered
that he was not entirely cut off from
the operation. Hodges worked man-
fully to feed the images through Pluto
to Luna at one end and the Iris at the
other, and Redkirk’s receiver picked
up the beam relayed inward from the
frigid planet.

Ambassador Morelli was a blurry
white face with dark blurs for eyes

STAR-LINKED

and black hair. Evidently, however,
he was recognizable to his superior,
for the conversation continued quite
a while.

“Wish I could figure out what he’s
talking about,” murmured the Phobos
operator.

Morelli, in stilted, guarded phrases
which he chose like a man selecting a
life insurance policy, indicated where
the “information” desired might be
found. That is, he seemed to be nam-
ing a place — Redkirk did not believe
the Department could employ so
many people with such curious cog-
nomens.

Well, if it is a code, it’s probably none
of my business, he thought regretfully.

He decided that he was getting to
be a busybody, and was relieved when
the time came to send some of the
transcribed messages down to the
Martian cities. This kept him inter-
mittently busy for some time.

Shortly after the last message was
cleared, a call came across the System
from Venus. Someone had to speak to
Altair VII about certain Altairian
microorganisms desired for urgent
medical research. Since it turned out
to be a conference hookup with several
personages at the terminal screens,
Redkirk and the Altairian operator
kept in constant contact' on a com-
panion beam to monitor the trans-
mission.

The Altairian struck Redkirk as
being oddly human in movements and
bodily attitudes despite a strikingly

134

135

unhuman physique. There was no
actual separation of head from body,
and the numerous short, one-sectioned
arms ending in powerful claws sug-
gested that the distant being had
evolved from something that had
crawled. His skin gleamed, between
areas of warty protuberances, with
brown and golden tints reminiscent of
either polished leather or some me-
tallic substance.

“Do you happen to speak Sola-
rian?” Redkirk asked him, having
glanced again at the beams focused
on screens One and Two.

“Some.”

The answering voice boomed
slightly, and Redkirk realized that it
was produced by the vibrating mem-
branes of air sacs that swelled out
below the wide, blubbery jaws.

“I have never been to Altair in
person,” said the Earthman. “Would
you have time to show me an outside
view near your station?”

“What . . . purpose?”

“Just curiosity,” Redkirk told him. '
“I want to see what things look like
in the light of a white, Class A star.
Sol is G, you know, and yellow.”

“Last part slow again?”

Redkirk repeated.

“I’ll show you scenes of Solarian
planets, if you like,” he offered in
conclusion.

“Would like,” the Altairian assured
him.

He faded from the screen and Red-

kirk took the opportunity to consult
his list of filed films for what lie
needed. While searching for scenes of
Mars and Earth, he had the outside
scanner pick up the part of the cres-
cent of Mars that showed above the
jagged horizon of Phobos, and sent it
out through screen Four.

He chose a few representative scenes
of Martian deserts and of mountains,
oceans, and cities of Earth, and fed
them into the series as he watched
what the other operator sent back —
stealing a second here and there to
check on the main business going
through.

Even with reception automatically
adapted to human vision, the land-
scape of Altair seemed bright and
shadowless. The glare of .the white
star burned down upon great expanses'
of flat land covered by low-growing
shrubs with pale, fleshy leaves. In the
distance, several mountain peaks glit-
tered, some of them smoking with evi-
dence of volcanic action.

Even an ocean scene made Redkirk
feel hot, as if he were exposed to the
glare of Earthly tropics. He decided
that there was good reason for the
Altairians he saw swimming to sport
such heavy hides.

The distant operator had just
switched in a view of one of his sys-
tem’s satellites, not unlike the scarred
face of Luna, when the conference
broke up.

Redkirk hastily brought the private
showing to an end. Before switching

136

ASTOUNDING §CIENCE-FICTJ.ON

off, he thanked the Altairian.

“Most pleasure,” the other assured
him in drumming tones. “ If call again,
ask for Delki Loori-Kam-Dul.”
“Thank you, I will. I am Redkirk
. . . Red-kirk . . . yes, that’s right.”
He punched a button to record the
number of the station’s film copy of
the transmission for the commercial
department or other future reference,
and cut the beam. He also made a
mental note of a new acquaintance,
sixteen light-years away in the con-
stellation Aquila.

He leaned back in his swivel chair
for a few moments, thinking about the
harsh surface of the planet he had just
seen. He was aroused from this reverie
when a call beeped in from Luna.

“Say! I’ve been waiting to come in
line -with you again,” he greeted
Oberhof. “I wanted to ask you about
that message.”

“The one to the Iris ? You wouldn’t
want me to give away diplomatic se-
crets, would you?”

Redkirk’s eyebrows went up.

“Was it that hush-hush?” he de-
manded, incredulously.

Oberhof put on a knowing expres-
sion and shifted his ground.

“Later, if I think I’m not being
spied on,” he muttered. “Right now,
I think you better take this call.”
“Who’s it for?” asked Redkirk.

“A personal for you,” replied the
Lunar operator. “From a . . . uh
. . . Mrs. Nina Redkirk, of Earth.
There’s also a film. Shall I send that

on my B band while you talk? ”
“Shoot!” said Redkirk.

He cut in his recorder via screen
Five, then leaned back to take the
personal on his main screen. In a mo-
ment, the features of a young woman
with reddish hair and a pert nose
came in clearly.

“Hello, Nina,” said Redkirk.

She smiled, a shade too cheerfully,
for he could see concern in her eyes.

“Harry! It’s good to see you! How
is everything?”

“ Same as ever,” he answered easily.
“You know by now what it’s like at a
station like Phobos. Tell me about
you — that’s what I’m interested in.”
“Oh . . . you know . . .. gosh, it’s
funny how I can make a call like this
and then forget everything I was going
to say! Did the man on Luna tell you
I’m sending movies I took of Barry? ”
“I’m recording them right now.
That Oberhof isn’t one to waste time.
How about Eric Barrow? Still seeing
a lot of you?”

“Ye-es.” She looked down. “As a
matter of fact, that was one reason I
wanted to call you.”

“Going to marry him?”

Pier head jerked up at that. She
searched his face for a clue to his feel-
ings. Though Redkirk could not see
her hands, he suspected that they
were twisting at her handkerchief, or
gripping tightly on a pencil.

“If you don’t,” he added good-
naturedly, “you’re a fool. I get reports

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137

that he’s a pretty nice guy.”

“Reports?”

He waved one hand airily.

“Oh, I’ve built up a lot of connec-
tions in this job. You’d be surprised
at the places I can reach to for an-
swers.”

She smiled ruefully.

“Then you don’t care too much?
Honestly?”

“Of course not! We had a good life
together for a few years, and I’m
grateful to you for it; but I have a
place here that I’ll probably keep for
life. That’s why I insisted that you
get the divorce. No use in your living
like a widow with none of the advan-
tages of that state.”

She had to laugh at the wicked wink
he sent across space to her. Then they
talked of a few other matters — Bar-
ry’s schooling, the new puppy, and
the like.

“We’ll have to cut this,” said Red-
kirk. “I’m getting a signal. Now,
don’t forget to call me every so often.
Tell me about the wedding. And keep
those movies of Barry coming; they’re
swell! ”

Nina said good-by hurriedly, and
Redkirk cut the screen. He glanced at
Five, saw that the film had been re-
corded, and keyed off a routine ac-
knowledgment to Luna. Receiving no
return call, he assumed that Oberhof
was busy.

He had had no incoming signal, but
the sight of Nina had made him
wonder how long he could keep up

the pretense of gaiety. Earth suddenly
seemed so far away that he could
hardly believe he had been born there.

A real signal made his head snap
up. He realized that he had • been
sitting there staring sightlessly at the
controls for several minutes. He
brought the call to the main screen
and discovered that it was a simple
relay from Canalopolis on the red
planet inward to Earth.

Oberhof showed his face briefly dur-
ing the operation.

“I’ll call you back in a little while,”
he told Redkirk.

The latter pressed a button that
would remove the record of Nina’s
film from the file and focus the pic-
tures on his screen. He grinned faintly
as he saw Barry romping with a gan-
gling puppy on a lawn of green Earth
grass, and felt a pang of loneliness as
his six-year-old son sawed off the
first slice of a large birthday cake.

When the film had run off, he sat
quietly for some minutes before Ober-
hof’s signal came in.

Redkirk shook himself and an-
swered.

“Now zero-beat that rasping voice
of yours and say something!” he or-
dered Oberhof. “What was the big
rumpus?”

The other operator grinned and
wagged his head.

“Don’t know as I ought to tell you.
Top secret. A real emergency call out
to the depths of space!”

“Come on!” demanded Redkirk.

“Well, to give you a quick sche-
matic — Morelli lit off for Procyon
without turning in the combination to
his office wall safe. Left it with his wife
and forgot to tell her it had to be
taken in to the department instanter.”

“Yeah—?”

“That’s all.”

“No secret papers? No urgent in-
structions? ”

Oberhof sucked in his lower lip and
shrugged.

Redkirk looked around at his com-
munications office, at the dials and
switches and instruments. He thought
of the powerful generators outside, of
the delicate and marvelous mecha-
nisms that could direct a beam across
light-years of subspace.

“Might have known,” he mur-
mured. “If Earth were exploding,
they’d have put through the message
by routine recording.”

“ I would like to send him a personal
bill for the complete cost of that little
chat,” growled Oberhof.

“Take it easy,” said Redkirk, grin-
ning. “Maybe we’ll save the world
next time.”

He glanced over his shoulder as the
door opened.

“Watch that blood pressure,” he
advised. “I’ll have to cut off now;
here comes my relief.”

Oberhof waggled a finger at him
and faded out. Redkirk looked over
his shoulder.

“Ready, Harry?” asked chubby

Ed Gamier from the doorway.

“As good a time as any,” agreed
Redkirk. “Everything looks quiet for
a few minutes. Johnny out there?”

“Yeah. We’ll be right in.”

Redkirk ran an eye over his board.
The screens were dead and all his
traffic for the watch had been cleared.
He pulled out the operator’s log and
signed it after glancing at the time.

Then he heard Johnny and Gamier
coming in, and turned his head to
watch them maneuvering the wheel-
chair through the door.

Redkirk put one hand against the.
edge of the control desk and swiveled
himself around as Gamier pushed the

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conveyance over to him. Johnny pre-
pared to help him from one chair to
the other.

“Dunno how you do it,” remarked
Gamier, steadying the wheel-chair
with a broad-fingered hand as he
watched Johnny lift his chief effort-
lessly in the light gravity of Phobos.
“Honest, I don’t. After a crack-up
like that, I think I’d crawl away an’
let somebody take care of me the rest
of my life.”

Redkirk got his hands on the grips
of the wheels and pivoted to face
Gamier. He looked up at the relief
operator with a grin on his lean,
tanned face.

“Stop making me a hero!” he
jeered. “ What would I do in a hospital
on Mars or Earth? Anywhere but
Phobos, I’d be flat on my back and
helpless.”

To demonstrate his present mobil-
ity, he rolled around Gamier and
pivoted the chair in the doorway to
look back at them. In the outer office,
Joe Wong, Garnier’s stand-by, clinked
a cup as lie poured himself coffee.

“How was that?” Redkirk asked
Gamier. “The way I’m banged up,
it’s only in gravity like this that I can
get around at all.”

Gamier nodded sympathetically.

“Yeah, I don’t blame you,” he said.
“A guy could go crazy, I guess, just
lying in a bed and thinking about how
he could never pilot a ship again,
never even go any place. Of course,
he could see his wife and family and
friends, instead of being marooned on
a chunk of rock like this.”

Redkirk smiled at him.

“I don’t feel very marooned,” he
retorted. “Tonight, for instance, I
talked to a man on the moon, watched
a test digging being started on Pluto,
and arranged a little matter with a
stranger on a Wolf 359 planet.”

Behind Garnier’s back, Johnny
glanced at the log.

“I also listened to a Solarian am-
bassador speaking out of space just
as if I were at the controls of another
ship again,” Redkirk continued.
“ Then I got me a good look at a planet
of Altair that I never saw before. And
to top it off, my best girl called me
long-distance and I watched my boy
grow a year!”

Gamier hitched up his jaw. He and
Johnny stared briefly at each other,
then back at Redkirk.

“And you call it work}’’ laughed
Redkirk, backing out the door.

END

140

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

INFORMATION

BY ALAN BARCLAY

It would be such an exceedingly uncomfortable feeling for a general
to launch an attack — if he kne w his proposed victim had a really effecti ve
weapon of reply! Like being there without being anywhere in between
to permit interception!

Illustrated by Rogers

Things. run in families, as the saying be a practical impossibility. Grandpa
is. Things such as a talent for music, Cantlan in the days of his youth had
or for mathematics, or for piloting once steered a thing he called a crawler
spaceships — or for having twins. —-a contraption weighing about ten

Rik Cantlan’s family had always tons mounted on caterpillar tracks
exhibited a marked talent for steering eight feet wide — up a flight of marble
things. A remote ancestor of Rik’s had steps and into the middle of about an
landed tlih first ship on Venus about a acre of red plush carpet adorning the
month after experts had proved this to floor of his Group Headquarters Mess.

INFORMATION 141

1 Ie was drunk at the time.

Rik’s father flew one of these odcl-
lodking winged atmospheric craft they
go in for on Ardan Minor underneath
a bridge. Later, during the recent war,
he flew a single-seater chaser right
slap through the flagship of the enemy
space navy. Admittedly this per-
formance killed him dead, but it did
the same thing to the flagship and to
large numbers of big brass and other
important personalities who were in-
habiting it at the time. Rik inherited
the family talent. He was test pilot at
the Space Flight Research Center,
with the rank of Lieutenant, Junior
Grade, Argol 11 Space Navy.

Here is Rik, reporting to his C.O.
He is precisely two thousand feet up,
in the dead center of the traffic lane
heading for the Center. He is doing
five hundred m.p.h. He is not doing
any more than that because his flivver,
which is his own private flivver and
not by any means new, will not go
any faster.

A few moments after first meeting
him, you find him in a stationary posi-
tion, poised above the parking space
adjoining the Center’s Administration
Building. He is still at two thousand
feet, for traffic regulations insist upon
a horizontal approach followed by
perfectly vertical descent. Some people
come down slow into car parks. Others
like to come down a bit faster than
that. Rik’s method consisted of cut-
ting his lift and letting himself drop

.142

like a stone, then checking his fall, at
the last possible moment.

“You were less than three inches off
the ground when you stopped her that
time, Mr. Cantlan,” one of the garage
hands protested. “One of these days
you’ll let your foot slip and you’ll stop
so near the ground you’ll make a deep
hole.”

“I expect I’d just bounce about six
feet,” Rik told him. He made for the
Administration Building, and for the
C.O.’s office. After a suitable delay —
there never was a time when Lieu-
tenants, Junior Grade, could 'walk
straight into their C.O.’s office — he
was admitted to see the great man.

“Ah! Cantlan,” said the great man.

“ For the record I’m supposed to have
fetched you here to give you a wigging
about something or other. Can you
think what that might be? Have you
been indulging in any forms of vice
lately?”

“None, sir. That is to say, no
breaches of Sendee discipline or even '
of civilian traffic regulations just
lately, sir.”

“ Ah, well! Consider you’ve been lec-
tured. Consider yourself reprimanded.
Now let’s get on to the real busi-
ness—”

“What are you going to call me this
time — just for the record? ”

“Let me see . . . shall we say ‘in-
sufferable young puppy’?”

“You’ve used that one twice al-
ready, sir.”

“Then invent something better if

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

you can. Now, business. How’s the
Professor coming along with his work,
do you think?”

“Just as you have always expected,
sir. He’ll get the answer sometime,
sure enough, but not soon. Maybe in
five years, maybe ten. Of course, he
thinks he’s pretty well got it already,
but you know how he talks.”

“ I’m more than ever convinced it
will take some years,” the C.O. said.
“ I’ve read his latest report . . . when
I say ‘read it’, I don’t mean under-
stood it, except that what he is saying
is No. Not yet.”

The C.O. stopped, and looked Rik
straight in the eye.

“We now know for sure that Corral
will be lined up to make their attack
on us in six months from today. If w6
had our ships fitted with this new
drive, and if they knew about it, we’re
convinced they would think twice.”

“Yes, sir,” said Rik.

“ So now is the time to consider put-
ting your own scheme into operation.
Sit down, Rik. Let us discuss.”

They discussed, for nearly two
hours.

Meet Jarvan Algar. Middle-aged,
tall, spare, gray-haired, handsome,
amiable, popular, wealthy, manager of
the Corrullian Export- Import Agency
on Argol 11. He had been on Argol for
five years; his speech was quite free
of that irritating affected Corral lisp.
He was well-liked by every kind of
person on Argol. In addition to being

INFORMATION

manager of the Corrullian Agency, a
fact which was known to all, he was
director of Corral’s Intelligence in this
sphere, a fact which he sometimes —
but not always — believed was un-
known to anyone.

Meet him in his large pleasant office.
He is talking to Sim Pardo, one of his
lieutenants. 'To be precise, he is not
talking. He is listening and Sim is
talking.

“ . . . There are quite a number of
scientists and technicians allocated to
this project, and in addition they have
a certain Lieutenant Rik Cantlan, a
Service test pilot. He’s a typically
reckless brainless young man — ”
“Spare me the character sketches,
Sim, my clear fellow,” Algar inter-
rupted amiably. “I know Rik Cant-
lan. Brainless or not, he is a top-rank
tost pilot, and if he’s in this thing, it’s
important. Now just try to tell me, in
less than fifty thousand words if you
can, what they’re trying to do.”

1 1 is amiability appeared to have the
effect of making Sim nervous.

“Yes, sir,” Sim said. “ They’re work-
ing on an application of the Darlan
Hyper space warp principle — ”
“Ah!” Algar interrupted, and
reached for a drawer. “I had some
suspicion of this. I’ve had some notes
on the subject sent out. There are
definite possibilities in this principle —
Here we are: investigated mathemat-
ically by Darlan about fifty years ago
— quite interesting — quite promising.
Just one snag, and do you know what

143

that is? No, I’m sure you don’t. A
space warp of this sort can be pro-
duced; it can be made to envelop a
physical object, even a large one; it
can be caused to transport that ob-
ject. But there is no means — I re-
- peat, no means at all, of pre-selecting
the point in space at which the object
will be released from the warp. In
other words, once a spaceship, for ex-
ample, is enveloped in the warp, it
might be released just anywhere — ”

“So the local boys are just wasting
their time?” Sim concluded trium-
phantly.

“You’re a fool, Sim,” his boss told
him imperturbably. “ Don’t you know
that inevitably, as soon as one scien-
tist has proved a thing to be impos-
sible, or impracticable, or unmanage-
able, another scientist starts sitting up
nights trying to prove him wrong —
and generally does. Who’ve they got
as their top scientist?”

“The well-known nut Torkin. Calls
himself ‘Professor’, quite like old
style.” Sim spoke scornfully. “They
dug him out of one of the local loony-
bins, where he’s been under care for
the last five years. He’s incurably
homicidal. He knocked off one of his
technicians once with a laboratory
stool. Now they’ve let him out and
put him in charge of this cockeyed
project. Of course, come to think of it,
he isn’t really a whole lot crazier than
the rest of these guys.”

“Sim, my dear fellow,” Algar re-
plied, coldly this time, “I feel you’ve

144

got one or two wrong ideas on this
thing. Listen: Cantlan may, as you
say, be reckless and brainless, but as a
test pilot he’s about the best there is.
Torkin is a nut, I admit, but his occa-
sional urges to brain his associates
with blunt instruments have nothing
at all to do with the quality of the
work he used to do on space warps. It
was brilliant.

“Consider, my dear Sim, consider this
further point: This planet is ripe for
the picking. We propose to take it over
in about six months from now . . .
that is to say, we’ll take it over if it
can be done quickly and cheaply. We
must above all avoid a long and costly
war. Suppose after we have committed
ourselves to an invasion we discover
these people have a new weapon; a
space warp, for example, which will
take their ships across to Corrul in a
few hours or minutes, instead of weeks
. . . imagine an' Argol warship mate-
rializing one day unexpectedly, un-
detectably, inside our defenses, re-
leasing its torpedoes, and then vanish-
ing. Not a nice idea, eh? We want to
know if such a thing is likely to hap-
pen, eh? Now get out of here and bring
me in some news.”

“What have you got there, Pro-
fessor?” Rik asked. “Looks to me like
a new super type of radar-controlled
remote-acting, self-loading mousetrap.”

“You brainless young fool,” the old
man snarled at him, “must I talk to
things like you? I suppose I must,

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

1

otherwise I get no co-operation. This
is what is called commonly a material
object, although the word is meaning-
less to the modern scientist. To be pre-
cise, it’s a sphere of heavy metal about
one centimeter in diameter. The cage
containing it, and the other little et
ceteras, are a space-warp generator
and director — ”

“Alii” exclaimed Rik. “Director,
eh? That’s the word that strikes my
ear — so you can direct as well as warp?
Better than your last attempt, eh,
Professor? ”

The old man snarled. Saliva drib-
bled from a corner of his mouth.

“You . . . you — I can direct it and
on this occasion I shall even indicate
in advance the spot to which I shall
shift it. Look, I shall make it material-
ize within this chalk mark.”

“Go ahead, Professor,” Rik invited.

“Who reported this?” Algar asked
Sim.

“The head laboratory technician,”
Sim answered. “It was a spherical
piece of metal, held in a sort of cage — ”
“Any power source?”

“Just a charged capacitor.”
“Well?”

“It moves a distance of five yards,
into the middle of a chalked ring al-
ready marked out by Torkin.”

“It was actually seen to move — or
did it disappear and then reappear?”
“ Can’t say, sir — the laboratory man
was not able to watch uninterruptedly.
The move occurred during an instant

INFORMATION

when he was looking in another
direction.”

“What did Cantlan say about
this?”

“Made some sort of witty remark
that nearly caused the Professor to
brain him with an iron bar — some-
thing about ‘good for mice but not
for men.’ ”

“The Professor made some miscal-
culation,” Rik explained to the C.O.
“ He’s always over-optimistic — the
specimen did not move in any direc-
tion, right or wrong, when he tried
the effect.”

“But his report says it did move.”

“ I know — that was arranged for the
benefit of any interested watcher.
There were five people in the labora-
tory at the time. Myself, I am inclined
to suspect the chief laboratory basher;
he has such a saintly and self-satisfied
air. I should be sorry if it turned out
to be that rather attractive job of
work the Professor has as his secre-
tary. Anyway, whoever was watching,
wanting to see the thing move, saw
just that.”

“But how?”

“The mark of genius is extreme sim-
plicity,” Rik informed his superior
calmly. “I flipped it across the table
with my finger while everyone was
being fascinated by the Professor’s
antics.”

“I don’t feel that that necessarily
puts us a whole lot forward,” the C.O.
objected. “However, carry on as you

145

think best. Now, by the way, I’ve had
a Security Report on you, young man.
I’m told you’re keeping bad company.
One Sim Pardo — well known to be in
enemy pay — who hopes to get the
directorship of some trading concern
when we have been liberated. You’ve
been seen weeping in each other’s
drinks in the Old Sol Tavern, which is
a nice homely sort of name for a pretty
disreputable dump.”

“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir — ”

“I hope you know what you’re
doing?”

“I do, sir. Trying my best to see
that we’re not liberated. You’ve no
conception how unwilling I am to be
liberated.”

- “Well, if you can drink the way
your father did, I suppose I need not
worry.”

“You needn’t worry, sir . . . and
by the way, sir? ”

“Well?”

“These reports and calculations of
the Professor’s — does anyone else get
them? ”

The C.O. looked up at Cantlan from
under shaggy gray eyebrows.

“Don’t worry about me, Rik, my
boy. I’m really quite good at this —
1 have a team of physicists separating
the wheat of genius from the chaff of
sheer lunacy.”

Sim reporting to Algar.

“They’re all set to try a bigger ex-
periment, sir,” he explained eagerly.
“A sizable chunk of metal, weighing

about a hundred kilos — they’re going
to warp it across a distance of fifty
yards — everything is set up. Labora-
tory cleared. Two sort of metal bulges
are fitted one on either side of this test
piece — a chalk mark on a bench about
fifty yards away to indicate where the
piece must land.”

“You don’t mean to say your man
can walk in and out of the laboratory
as he likes when an experiment of this
sort is going on?”

“Oh, no. The laboratory’s sealed
now. Out of bounds. No one allowed
in, even for cleaning up — but our
chap’s got a place on the roof of the
next building, and a telescope, and a
little mirror fixed. He can see every-
thing that happens.”

' “Well, this time I want him to see
the thing actually happen, even if he
has to keep watching till he goes
cross-eyed.”

“Yes, sir. Another thing, sir?”
“Well?”

“This test pilot, Rik Cantlan — he
and I are pretty good friends now.
He goes most nights to the Old Sol
night club — drinks a lot for a test pilot
—I reckon it won’t be long now before
I get him talking.”

“ Good, Sim. Just be careful, though,
that he doesn’t get you talking too
much instead.”

Sim to Algar, excitedly:

“ It worked, sir. The experiment
worked! Our man saw the test cube
shifted. It disappeared off one test

bench and reappeared on the other
fifty yards away. Just sort of flicked
across, as it were. And then they
flicked it back again.”

“Very well, Sim. Good for you — I
won’t say it looks too good for Corrul,
though. But after all, we’re paid to
get information. But speak on, my
dear fellow, I see you have more to
tell.”

“Boss,” Sim burst out ; “I’ve got
the goods. I can show you how the
space warp business can be worked —
I don’t understand these things my-
self, but I got Rik Cantlan good and
plastered last night, and he made a
drawing. I kept on ragging him about
working on a pipedream experiment
under a lunatic scientist. At last he
said it was no pipe-dream. It worked.
At first he mumbled a bit, talked about
it being done by mirrors or something.
Finally, when I got him good and sore,
he began to draw it out — here it is.”

“If this wasn’t just too good to be
true, Sim, I’d say you’d made both
our fortunes — but I’m inclined to
doubt whether even Rik Cantlan could
draw it on a menu card. I also doubt
very much whether Rik would give
anything away even when plastered.”

“Rik,” said the C.O., “you’re in
trouble. Real trouble this time. Our
Intelligence say you were plastered
last night in that place of yours and
spilled a lot of information to Sim
Pardo. You made a drawing, too.
What have you to say about this? ”

“Sir,” Rik answered, “I was not
plastered, although a number of people
including Sim, thought I was. He had
already got a lot of dope on our recent
test. Made out that the news of it was
nothing more than common gossip.
He told me straight out that the Pro-
fessor had moved a block of metal
about fifty yards. ‘Come on,’ says
Sim, ‘ tell us how you did it, Rik.’ So I
made a drawing showing that it was
all done by mirrors.”

“You’re a fool, Sim,” Algar said.
“This drawing, underneath all the
wiring and nonsense, is in fact a
method of making the trick appear to
work by means of mirror reflections
and lights. Rik Cantlan wasn’t as
drunk as you thought. In fact, he
probably wasn’t as drunk as you
were.

“At the same time,” Algar contin-
ued reflectively, “this does tell us
something — quite a few things, in fact.
For instance, that they know you’re
watching. That means they’re watch-
ing us — hence they have some reason
for watching us. Hence again, they
must have something real, a genuine
secret that needs guarding. Keep after
it, Sim, but leave Rik Cantlan alone
in future.”

“So the drawing showed the old
mirror trick, eh?” the C.O. queried.
“And how did the shift actually take
place? Has old Torkin actually got
something at last? ”

146

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

INFORMATION

147

“ I’m afraid not, sir — one of my men
and I got in and fixed things up at
night. The trick was done with four
mirrors and some lights. When the
Professor pressed his switches they
operated my lights as well as his own
gadgets. His gadgets didn’t do any-
thing worth while, but my lights and
mirrors did.”

“What? Then you went and told
the enemy precisely the truth?”

“Yes, sir — I told them the one
thing in the world they will never on
any account believe.”

“I see that. It’s subtle, though, Rik,
quite subtle. It’s like fighting an en-
emy with spiders’ webs.”

“Our other defenses are not very
much more effective against Corrul
than spiders’ webs,” Rik retorted,
“True. Well, what next?”
“Nothing, for a while, sir, than I
hope to stage the big thing — the final
test. It’ll be in a couple of months now.”
“Very well.”

“In connection with that, sir, hoi)v
are your tame physicists making out
with the Professor’s calculations?”
“Having the time of their lives —
interesting, they say. Illuminating —
elegant treatment — You know the
stuff — but nothing solid has emerged.”

“What do you know, Sim?” Algar
asked his lieutenant some weeks later.
“Nothing fresh, sir.”

“Ever heard of blisters, Sim?” the
boss asked.

“Blisters, sir? What d’you mean,
148

blisters?”

“They’re appearing on all naval
ships. Each and every ship has a little
trip out to the Satellite. It stays there
about ten days and when it comes back
it has a neat little pair of bulges or
blisters, one on each side just forward
of the center section — Why, Sim?
Why? Can you tell me that?”

“I don’t know, sir. Why is it?”
“You blistering fool,” Algar said,
appropriately but viciously. “ I’m not
starting a guessing game with you.
When I tell you about these blisters,
it means I want you to go out and get
me an explanation.”

“We could never get a man out to
Satellite, sir; it’s naval,” Sim pro-
tested.

“I don’t want to hear about your
troubles — I’m asking you a question,
and I want you to come back with the
answer. I want you to come running
back with the answer. And while
you’re seeking an answer to that par-
ticular question, here are some more
to occupy you and your men at the
same time: All the factories on this
planet are working overtime on naval
contracts. Contracts for electronic
equipment. For example, large-size
tank capacitors — Tell me what all this
is about. Get me drawings. Get me
photographs, analyses, specifications,
all the usual stuff. This affair is be-
ginning suddenly to be a bit too big
and fast-moving for my liking.”

About two weeks after this Rik
ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

1

Cantlan was cashiered. There was no
doubt at all about this. An announce-
ment appeared in the Naval Gazette.
Rik himself admitted it. He was to be
found, wearing civilian attire, in one
or the other of the less reputable bars
in the capital, drinking himself stupid.
He was quite willing to talk about his
troubles. He attributed his trouble to
the jealousy of a superior. After some
time, no doubt when his money was
exhausted, Rik drifted away, dis-
appeared and was seen no more. No
doubt he had shipped out to a distant
planet.

“What was the specific cause?”
Algar asked.

“Eh?” Sim exclaimed. “Oh, you
mean what did he do to get himself
trimmed. He flew a flivver in at the
front door of the Old Sol and went a
number of times round the ballroom
at an altitude of six inches and a speed
of about a hundred and twenty an
hour. It was some sight. I was there.
He wasn’t in the flivver at the time
either — he was riding ' astride. You
know — it’s been done sometimes at
exhibitions.”

“I know, but not inside ballrooms.
Was that all?”

“ Not quite. You know there’s a pool
and a fountain in the middle of the
ballroom of the Old Sol?”

“I’ve been occasionally in the Old
Sol,” Algar admitted.

“Rik parked his flivver, splosh! in
the middle of the pool, then undressed,
pretended to dive off and swim

ashore — ”

“I get the general picture,” Algar
admitted. “Still — ”

“Yes, sir?”

“Junior Naval. Officers have done
tricks like that before — I don’t mean
that particular stunt, of course, for no
other man drunk or soberjias the skill
to equal Rik there — but naval men do
such things, don’t they? They’re not
cashiered as a rule. Reprimanded per-
haps, or reduced in seniority. Things
are usually said about high spirits, and
so forth — ”

“Cantlan was given the dull thud
all right,” Sim asserted with satisfac-
tion.

“I know,” Algar reflected. “A bit
drastic though.”

“Perhaps this is the answer, sir,”
Sim told Algar a couple of days later.
He held out to his boss a printed news
sheet. It wasn’t in local type; in fact,
it was written in the rather archaic
script of the remote little planet Epsi-
lon 111 Beta. Algar could read the
stuff all right.

“Well! Well! Well!” he exclaimed.
“So Rik Cantlan makes a hobby of
flying flivvers round ballrooms wher-
ever his ship may land him!”

“Yes, sir,” Sim agreed, “he told me
his ship visited Epsilon — I guess he
did the stunt there first. You see it
caused quite a stir. Rik himself spent
the night in the local jail. His skipper
had to apologize to the local authori-
ties. Then on top of that Rik comes

INFO'S MAT ION

149

back here, goes to the Old Sol, gets
plastered, and pulls the very same
stunt again just to show he can do it
twice.”

“I guess that explains the severity
of his sentence — ” Algar’s voice trailed
away to nothing. He went on reading
the paper.

“By the way,” he asked presently,
“when did Rik pull this trick of his
at the Old Sol?”

“ The day after he got back from this
trip.”

“ What day was that? ”

“Two-hundred-and-tenth of the
year,” Sim said.

“This paper says the same trick
was performed on Epsilon, which,
mind you, is some considerable dis-
tance away, on the third of their tenth
month — just look up that conversion
calendar and tell me what Epsilon’s
third of tenth means in our year here
onArgol.”

Sim did as he was told.

“Third of the tenth on Epsilon is
two hundred and eight of the year
here — There must be a mistake. It
just can’t be right. He does his stunt
on Epsilon, and then two days later
does the same thing here—* Why, it
takes sixteen days from Epsilon!”

“Yes,” Algar agreed, “it’s a mis-
take — or alternatively it’s the answer
to our question. Listen, Sim. Get a
description of the ship Rik was serving
in. Its name, its dimensions. Its cap-
tain and crew; their names and their
descriptions. Everything about them.

150

Ask if the ship had blisters. Above all,
verify the dates. Then take one of the
company’s ships and send a man to get
the same information about the same
ship and crew when it was at Epsilon.

We must see if they check.”

Everything did, in fact, check per-
fectly. The description of Rik sent
from Epsilon was particularly detailed,
for the local police had entertained
him for a night, and had given him a
routine going-over. They even had the
mole under his right arm. Besides,
there really was no doubt at all. No
other man could have done that trick
with the flivver without wrapping it
and himself round one of the pillars of
the dance hall.

“ Well, ” Algar said, speaking to him-
self this time, “now we know. They
take two days to come from Epsilon
to Argol. The ship has blisters. A good
part of those two days could have been
occupied in take-off and approach
... so there will be no invasion of
Argol, not for a few years yet any-
way.”

He began to consider the form of the
report that he must send home.

■ •

The C.O. climbed rather stiffly into •!
his official flivver.

“O.K.” he told the naval driver.

The little machine shot aloft. “Not so
fast, young fella-me-lad,” the C.O.
growled. “Some interested party see-
ing you toss this flivver around might
be reminded of the recently departed

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

Rik Cantlan.” rank, and decorated. A little later than

“What’s the news?” the driver that, Algar received a summons to re-
asked. port home to Corral. He knew well

“It has worked, my boy,” the old enough that if he obeyed that sum-
man chuckled. “Algar sent off his re- mons he would be executed, so he sur-
port. We’ve seen that. He’s had his rendered instead, rather gracefully, to
reply back. They’ve canceled their the Argol authorities,
invasion plans. Our men on Corrul By this time Algar had pieced to-
have positive evidence of this.” gether most of the true story. Ships

“So how long must I stay this can be duplicated. They can even be

way?” the driver asked. named alike. Captains and crew can

“Until our lunatic scientist and my be given duplicate names; even their

boys have got the bugs out of this appearances can be faked near enough

invention.” to pass for purposes of description,

“That means five years,” the driver but what Algar never understood, for

grumbled. the secret was never released, was how

not only the unique flying skill, but
The development job took four the detailed physical appearance of
years. At the end of that time the Rik Cantlan, could be duplicated.
Argol space fleet was completely I told you, didn’t I, that things run
equipped with the Darlan-Torkin in families? Like skill in music, or left-

drive. At just about the same time handedness, or large feet — or even

Rik Cantlan was reinstated in his having twins?

- THE END

IN TIMES TO COME

In the March issue, a new serial starts; “Gunner Cade,” by Cyril Judd — -
who is an author with four arms and two heads, and uses all with excellent effect

— and it has a cover by a new artist, Pawelka. Gunner Cade is the story of a
lone, idealistic man’s fight against injustice ; his right to be a member of his own
strange society. They insisted he was a rebel, a villain, an outlaw, and a black-
guard. It is very dangerous for a culture to call highly idealistic men such names

— which fact Gunner Cade and his civilization found out to their deep, mutual
surprise.

Incidentally, that cover Pawelka did — and the black and whites — are his
first art work for us. I think we have a new' art find. Let me know what you
think, will you? > The Editor

INFORMATION

151

THE REFERENCE LIBRARY

BY P. SCHUYLER MILLER

WHAT’S NEW?

The overwhelming trend in science-
fiction book publishing has been, until
recently, to reprint the best and most
popular serials and short stories from
the leading magazines. This gives per-
manence to the best — and much of the
second-best — in the magazines, but
does not contribute much to the de-
velopment of types of science fiction
which do not fit the editorial policies
of the existing periodicals.

As was noted last month, seven
“new” science-fiction novels appeared
during the first nine months of 1951
which had not been serialized previ-

152

ously. Except for minor adjustments
to provide the necessary installment-
by-installment suspense, it is a little
hard to see why such stories as Wil-
liamson’s “Dragon’s Island,” Camp-
bell’s “The. Moon is Hell,” Temple’s
“Four-Sided Triangle,” or Mullen’s
“Kinsmen of the Dragon” would not
be very acceptable to the editors and
readers of most magazines now or re-
cently in the field. But L. Sprague de
Camp’s “Rogue Queen” is something
else again.

Here: is an adventure story whose
theme is sex, It is not in the least sexy
by usual rental-library standards; A
pocket-book publisher who was true

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-DICTION

to the text — though who is? — could
not even find an adequately bosomy
wench for his cover, unless he were to
go overboard and show the battle of
the brood-queens. With thorough de
Campian deftness and logic every sit-
uation of the beelike humanoid society
is built up to its inevitable, though far
from evident conclusion, in as inno-
cent a plot as you could wish — but
odds are that the story could never
withstand the post office and news-
stand taboos which stomach pornog-
raphy but condemn subtlety. It is to
be hoped that publishers will look for
and find more books like this — science
fiction to the core, but adult through-
out.

A much more novel step has been
taken by Raymond J. Healy, co-editor
with J. Francis McComas of “Ad-
ventures in Time and Space”— Ran-
dom House, 1946 — in his collection of
ten brand-new stories on ten themes
by — as it happens — eleven authors.
In a degree Bleiler and Dikty had
stolen Healy’s thunder by commission-
ing one original story for their “Best
Science-Fiction Stories: 1951,” but the
concept of a written-to-order anthol-
ogy to replace the usual process of
gleaning has unlimited possibilities,
especially in the hands of a creative
editor.

“New Tales of Space and Time —
Henry Holt & Co., New York. 1951.
294 pp. $3.50 — as the book is called,
contains two absolutely top-notch sto-
ries which will undoubtedly be re-

THE REFERENCE LIBRARY

printed elsewhere and often. One of
these, Anthony Boucher’s “..The Quest
for Sain Aquin,” would have had diffi-
cult sledding in most magazines, for
its unorthodox treatment of some of
the basic philosophical problems of
religion and the tone of gentle mockery
with which it follows the adventures
of the fugitive priest Thomas and his
“robass” companion, as he searches
for a new saint in a future world
where followers of any religion are
hunted down. The other, Kris Nev-
ille’s “Bettyann,” is an original, hu-/
man, moving story of the inner con-
flict within a child of an alien race,
adopted by mankind and brought up
as a human being, when she discovers
her true heritage. These two stories
are worth the price of the book. If they
can be classified, they represent the
“Alien Race” and “Future Vignette”
categories.

The quality of the other eight sto-
ries is also well up to the standards of
current publication. Ray Bradbury
opens the book with a typically poetic
concept of the alien character of an-
other world, “Here There Be Tygers,”
not one of his best stories but well
ahead of most of the field. Cleve
Cartmill has done a neat, taut, mys-
tery of the not-too-far-distant future
in “You Can’t Say That,” with an
aside to our growing trend toward cen-
sorship and secrecy in government.
R. Bretnor brings back Papa Schim-
melhorn of the now classic “The
Gnurrs Come From the Voodvork

153

Out” with an adolescent relative who
has even more hilariously developed
powers, “Little Anton.”

Isaac Asimov’s contribution to the
book, “In a Good Cause — ”, is super-
ficially the story of the work of a
rebel against authority, but carries a
neat little hooker to justify the quo-
tation from which its title derives:
“In a good cause, there are no fail-
ures.” From A. E. van Vogt comes the
book’s robot or cybernetic story,
“Fulfillment,” and from Gerald Heard
a characteristic enlargement of his
proposal that the flying saucers are
piloted by bees from Mars, “B + M
— Planet 4.” Heard’s style appeals
strongly to some readers and poisons
others like an over-age clam, but there
is a possible hidden catch to the char-
acter of the dwarf humanoid which
might be considered in connection
with the “secret” of de Camp’s
“Rogue Queen.”

There remain two time-travel sto-
ries: “Tolliver’s Travels,” by Frank
Fenton and Joseph Petracca, which
uses a device from fantasy to carry its
Hollywood script-writer into a future
of unbounded “happiness,” and your
reviewer’s “Status Quondam,” which
carries a geologist to Periclean Athens.
A time story of the latter type should
recreate the minutiae and atmosphere
of the past as authentically as do the
pages of Boswell’s journals for eight-
eenth century London; that, plus the
contrasts of plunging a modern man
into it, are its reasons for being. I’m

154

afraid that it can’t be done success-
fully in ten thousand words: correction
— I can’t do it, though I’d like to and
may try again.

Ray Healy definitely planned this
made-to-order anthology as an “up-
beat” collection, a deliberate swing
away from the doom-croaking pessi-
mism of so many current stories. The
heroes of the two time-travel stories
find home a very satisfactory place to
be; Bettyann likes people; van Vogt’s
machine finds that it can live with
men; Bradbury’s planet reacts to men
as they react to her; and, of course,
Pappa Schimmelhorn loves every-
body, especially blondes. Yet there is
nothing Pollyannaish about the book
or the individual stories. In at least
one case Healy worked hard and long
with the author to get the effect he
wanted. Readers should find the result
worth the effort — and no one should
miss “Bettyann” or “The Quest for
Saint Aquin.”

Let us hope that other anthologists
will take up the challenge and give us
more collections of the ne.w, as well
as the best of the old.

'

As this goes to press, Shasta Pub-
lishers have just announced an annual
competition for the best original, un-
published science-fiction novel with
“no magazine taboos.” There will be
a grand prize of §250 with a $750 ad-
vance against royalties — $1000 in all
— and runners-up may also be pub-
lished. Entries in this first contest

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE -FICTION

I must be in by June 30, 1952. A year
from now there may be a great deal
to write about in a discussion like this.

Also on the side of novelty is the
announcement that Don Day of 3435
Northeast 38th Avenue, Portland,

( Oregon, will soon publish an index to
magazine science-fiction since 1926 —
8J2 by 11 inches, cloth or fabricoid
bound, with both title and author in-
dexes. Very little fantasy will be cov-
ered. The book will run to about two
hundred pages, in an edition of two
thousand; Day reports that the price
will be $6.50 after publication, with a
pre-publication price of $5.00. Here is
a companion-piece to the Shasta
“Checklist.”

And Fantasy Press, not to be out-
done, has met a long-felt, need with a
line of science-fiction and fantasy
bookplates — exactly what you need
if you like to fit your bookplate to the
type of book. The first lot, at $2.00 a
hundred, includes three by Edd Car-
tier, three by Hannes Bok, and six by
Ric Binkley, F.P.’s current staff artist.
On second look, Cartier may have
done four, for I believe he did the
robot-and-press Fantasy Press colo-
phon, which is one of the lot.

THE BEST SCIENCE FICTION STORIES:
1951, edited by Everett F. Bleiler
and T. E. Dikty. Frederick Fell, Inc.,
New York. 1951. 352 pp. $2.95

The Bleiler-Dikty selections, of
which this is the third, have estab-
lished themselves as intelligent, repre-

THE REFERENCE LIBRARY

senta.tive, well-balanced panoramas of
the science-fiction field. In spite of
the title, the period covered is 1950,
there seems, also, to be an even greater
spread of sources than in either of the
previous volumes, with nine magazines
represented and one story, Frank M.
Robinson’s “The Santa Claus Planet,”
an original written for the book.
There is the usual interesting and
thoughtful introduction by the editors,
This magazine is represented twice,
with Alfred Bester’s superman tale,
“Oddy and Id,” and Roger Flint
Young’s minutely worked-out story,
“Not to be Opened.” Among other
choice items are such rare comedies as
R. Bretnor’s “The Gnurrs Come
From the Voodvork Out,” Sprague de
Camp’s “Summer Wear,” and Bill
Brown’s “The Star Ducks,” and such
grim little items as Richard Mathe-
son’s “Born of Man and Woman,”
Cyril Kornbluth’s “The Mindworm,”
William F. Temple’s “Forget-Me-
Not,” and especially Fritz Leiber’s
“Coming Attraction.” Damon Knight’s
“To Serve Man” has one of the neat-
est last-line punches of all time, with
Fredric Brown’s “Last Martian” run-
ning up. Ray Bradbury is represented
by his already-famous time-travel
mystery, “The Fox in the Forest,”
and A. E. van Vogt by a fine picture of
alien life in “Process.” For the varia-
tions on human — or humanoid — soci-
ety, which the editors consider to be
the current trend in the field, we have
the Robinson story, Katherine Mac-

155

Lean’s biological mystery “Cotita-
gion,” Frank Belknap Long’s “Two
Face,” and especially “Trespass,” by
Poul Anderson and Gordon Dickson,
which raises some beautiful complica-
tions among the legal aspects of time
travel. Finally, in a story which would
have rated a “nova” or “thought va-
riant ” rating a decade ago, Charles L.
Harness in “The New Reality” intro-
duces a really new idea, that the struc-
ture of the universe is evolving with
man’s concepts of it.

You may have your own preferences
for the eighteen “best” science fiction
short stories’ of 1950, but you must
certainly agree that the Bleiler-Dikty
choices are in the top rank.

THE CASE OF THE LITTLE GREEN MEN,

by Mack Reynolds. Phoenix Press,

New York. 1951. 224 pp. $2.00

Readers who remember H. H.
Holmes’ “Rocket to the Morgue” —
Duell, 1942 — with its science-fiction
background will find an amusing par-
allel in this first mystery by a practic-
ing science-fiction writer. Jeb Knight,
its sad-sack private detective, is hired
by a trio of fen — members of the ex-
clusive Scylla Club — to find out
whether Earth is being peopled by in-
cognito aliens from the stars. One of
his clients is promptly murdered un-
der seemingly impossible circumstances;
a witness finds a heat-ray burn on his
bedroom wall; another fen is found
with a neatly burnt hole over his
heart and a scent of ozone in the air

156

at the AnnCon, tenth World Science i
Fiction Convention. If the person be-
hind these events is more apparent to
the reader than to the police or Jeb
Knight, the atmosphere of fen, BEMs,
and pros is still good fun, and Jeb is
a very likable and very plausible char-
acter. With more experience he may
be up to more intricate puzzles, and
we hope some of them will bring him •
back into the aura of the Scylla Club.

FOUNDATION, by Isaac Asimov.

Gnome Press, New York. 1951. 255

pp. $2.75

The revision and inter-writing of
Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” stories
which he has done for this book is
not quite so successful a job as the
one he did last year with his positronic
robot tales in “I, Robot.” There was a
fascination about the working out of
various facets of the famous laws of
robotics in the latter stories which is
not quite there in the development of
the Seldon crises in the new book.
(Will the writers of jacket .blurbs
please get names straight?)

“Foundation” takes us through the
first four stages in the dissolution of
the Galactic Empire and the uncon-
scious efforts of the First Foundation,
on Terminus, to shorten an inter-
regnum of thirty thousand years to a
mere thousand. We meet Hari Seldon
and watch him out-maneuver the poli-
ticians of the Empire and secure a
haven for his Encyclopedists in the
galactic Periphery. Fifty years later,

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION ■’

with Salvor Hardin, we face the -first
predicted crisis of invasion by the
fragmented kingdoms which have de-
veloped out of the ruins of the old
Empire. In another thirty years comes
the second crisis, and a new balance
through the use of a new type of
power. Finally comes the era of the
Traders and Merchant Princes, and
a third crisis in the resurgence of a
degenerate Empire, again met by an-
other of the social' forces which Hari
Seldon’s science of psychohistory per-
mitted him to foresee.

“Foundation” covers a little more
than two hundred years in the history
of the Foundation. The episode of The
Mule, the search for and discovery of
the Second Foundation lie ahead. It is
to be hoped that Gnome will give us
the full series in time.

THE HOUSE OF MANY WORLDS, by
Sam Merwin, Jr. Doubleday & Com-
pany, New York. 1951. 216 pp.
$2.75

Along with the growing pains which
science fiction has developed as a re-
sult of its relatively recent acceptance
into the family of “literature” there
seems to have come a false sense of its
own importance. Editors, reviewers,
readers, and doubtless grubbers for
Ph.D. theses are searching doggedly
for “significance” in every new story
to leave the press. The merits of a
just-plain-good-story seem to be over-
looked.

Sam Merwin, who as editor and re-

THE REFERENCE LIBRARY

viewer has proved himself a good judge
of good stories — and of the other usu-
ally mentioned concomitants — has now
spun a good adventure-intrigue yarn
of his own. Reporter Elspeth Marriner
and photographer Mack Fraser, smell-
ing out the mystery of Spindrift Key,
find themselves up to their necks in a
plot which involves three parallel
time-tracks. One, in which they are
sent as catalysts to avert a continental
war, has resulted when Aaron Burr’s
conspiracy succeeded, Napoleon es-
caped to Mexico from St. Helena with
American — or rather Columbian — as-
sistance, and in 1869 the North at-
tempted to secede from the Republic
and its oligarchy. A democratic insur-
rection is complicated by aspirations
of the Mexican. Empire to take over
the entire continent, and by the fact
that this world lacks heavier-than-air-
flight— but has built a Mars rocket
and has disintegrators. They are then
shuttled to the world of a colleague,
the beautiful Juana, in which technol-
ogy has so outstripped the humanities
that a cataclysmically soaring popula-
tion is on the verge of global suicide.
Space flight, as developed in World
Two, may be the release needed
to prevent disaster. A nasty young
blackguard of a No’therner who occa-
sionally uses the . name Everard van
Hooten turns up at all the wrong
times and eventually swipes the Plans
and the Formula, as his kind have
been doing since the days of ancient
Egypt and Sumer.

. 157

It’s roundly entertaining, it’s firmly
plotted, and it’s fully packed with all
sorts of neat little bits of color and
detail. And it closes with a lovely little
hooker on the last page but one.

SPACE ON MY HANDS, by Fredric

Brown. Shasta Publishers, Chicago,

III. 1951. 224 pp. $2.50

The family of the future whose por-
trait by Malcolm Smith is on the
jacket of this selection of nine top-
notch stories may well be that of the
expatriated Martian, Cirderf Nworb,
who has been turning out some of the
best current detective stories and has
wielded an unabashed slapstick on the
august person of Science-Fiction. He
is certainly responsible for the hair-
drier which the fetching woman of the
family seems to have built into her
space-helmet.

All of these stories, to judge from
the credits, have apeared in other
magazines than this. Some have been
anthologized; others may be brand
new to you. Most of them are worth
rereading anyway, if you don’t take
too serious a view of what should go
on in such places. That the four hun-
dred sixty-eight brightest stars should
cavort around the heavens — that five
bug-eyed monsters should call on a
science-fiction writer — that a man
should be murdered in five different
ways, simultaneously and mutually
exclusively — that a family of space-
rovers should find an ostrich wearing a
bow tie, a false-front saloon, and a

movie star on an unknown planet of
Sirius — that a mouse should return
from the Moon with a Minsky-Ger-
man accent: these things Fredric
Brown asks you to accept. Then there
is the tricky little story about the last
man on Earth, “Knock,” and the
spine-creepy “Come and Go Mad.”
And a rare twist to a detective story
laid for convenience in 1999. You’ll
have fun with this one.

WORLD OF WONDER, edited by

Fletcher _ Pratt. Twayne Publishers,

New York. 1951. 445 pp. $3.95-

Fletcher Pratt, who needs no intro-
duction here, proves himself as dis-
cerning an editor as he is an historian
with this anthology of nineteen sci-
ence-fiction and fantasy tales. Reach- •
ing back to Kipling, O. Henry, and
Gouverneur Morris, he comes down to
1951 with H. Beam Piper’s tricky
little exchange of diplomatic corre-
spondence in “Operation RSVP.” He
has held his selections from this maga-
zine to less than half of the collection
— which means novelty to many faith-
ful readers — and has provided such
surprises as Franz Kafka’s “Meta-
morphosis” and the unexpurgated
version of Esther Carlson’s grisly little
“Museum Piece.” Beyond them we
have such of the faithful as Asimov,
Tenn, Brown, Blish, Heinlein, de
Camp, Merril, Bond, Chandler, and
Bradbury, with Philip MacDonald,
an occasional but very potent stray-
over from the mystery field.

The editor throws in a highly com-
petent introduction on “The Nature
of Imaginative Literature,” with thor-
ough analyses of each story to boot.
In the introduction he sets up four
standards for good imaginative fiction,
which are worth condensing here: (1)
the problem presented by the story
must be a human problem; (2) the
writer is allowed only one premise or
assumption, stated early in the story
and never violated — the prohibition
against inconsistency is stronger in
imaginative literature than in any
other field of fiction, Mr. Pratt main-
tains; (3) in science fiction, no estab-
lished scientific fact may be violated
except when the violation itself con-
stitutes the basis of the story and is
plausibly explained; and (4) in pure
fantasy, no established fact of normal
psychological behavior may be vio-
lated unless, again, that makes the
story. No special phenomena just for
effect, says Fletcher Pratt.

FAR BOUNDARIES, edited by August

Derleth. Pellegrini & Cudahy, New

York. 1951. 292 pp. $2.95

The twenty stories collected here
comprise the second in August Der-
leth’s series of source-books in imag-
inative literature. Last year, in “Be-
yond Tune and Space” (Pellegrini,
$4.50), he went clear back to the Greek
and Roman sources; in this companion

THE

volume the oldest of what he calls the
“primitives” dates from 1785 — a bal-
loon trip to a utopia on the Moon.

The book as a whole will be more
readable than the earlier one. J. A.
Mitchell’s “The Last American” (1889)
is still a good burlesque of our life at
the turn of the century — and today —
though a little heavy-handed. A second
section of “mid-period pieces” actu-
ally range in publication date between
1936 and 1949, while the eleven selec-
tions from “the contemporary scene”
run back to 1944. What the divisions
illustrate, of course, is evolution in at-
titude toward science fiction rather
than hard-and-fast changes in types of
story. Wandrei, Highstone, Grendon,
Jacobi, and Bloch are presented as
representative of the middle period — -
names more closely associated with
fantasy than main-line science fiction.
For the moderns we are given Leinster,
Long, van Vogt, Harris, Carter, Gren-
don, Bond, Bradbury, Holmes, and
Leiber, though, again, the stories
chosen seem to represent maturation
of older themes rather than the intro-
duction of new ones.

Remembering that these are in-
tended as period pieces, representing
“off -trail” pioneering at three levels,
no reader should be disappointed in
the book and many who disliked “Be-
yond Time and Space” will enjoy this
“appendix” to the larger volume.

END

158

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

THE REFERENCE LIBRARY

159

( Continued from page 6)

■ not.”

The neurosurgeon to whom I spoke
made another point; this point I pass
on, and with it an invitation to con-
tribute to Brass Tacks some highly
interesting comments. He commented
that, if you want to find out How to
make sulfuric acid, you go to a chem-
ical engineer who makes the stuff; if
you want to find out how iron is made,
you should ask someone who makes
iron. And, similarly, if you want to
find out how human beings think —
the real authorities are people who
think for a living. The theory' of crea-
tive thinking has never been worked
out; it is not logic, but something else,
because logic can derive only wrong
answers from wrong data — but crea-
tive thinking somehow succeeds in
getting right answers from inadequate,
misinterpreted and irrelevant data.

The readership of this magazine
quite evidently is interested in crea-
tive thinking; a high proportion of us
are professionally engaged in making
a living by creative thought. Very
well, gentlemen — how do you do it?

The basis of the scientific method is
that there is no higher authority than
the real operation itself. The authority
on sulfuric acid making is not the
theoretical physical-chemist, but the
successful chemical engineer — because
if the engineer’s data of actual opera-
tion disagrees with the theoretician’s
theory, the theory goes back for re-
vision.

I(i()

Your thinking itself is the final
authority on how creative thinking is
done. Iiow is it done?

Another basic of the scientific
method is that it works by stating
dogmatic, absolutistic postulates —
and then looking for the fact that will
break the statement, for that new fact
will aid in formulating a better, more
accurate statement. The “rubber”
statement of the order “Some indi-
viduals, under certain conditions, oc-
casionally display a tendency to float
six inches off the ground,” on the other
hand, can never be disproved. You
never saw anything like that. Tsk, tsk
— doesn’t prove it’s wrong — just shows
that you weren’t around when one of
those rare individuals was under the
right conditions — undefined, please
note — that provoked him to display
his tendency to float six inches off the
ground. You haven’t disproved it at
all. Furthermore, you never will, and I
can go on happily down my nice blind
alley looking for one of those indi-
viduals under the right conditions, and
be convinced I can prove it some day
— and no one can prove I won’t,
either.

That sort of rubber statement gets
us no forwarder. It’s typical of the
mystic and the nonscientist only ; any-
one calling that sort of statement a
“cautious, scientific statement” is not
aware of the basic requirements of the
scientific method. Newton made some
scientific statements; they’re not no-
ticeable for their delicacy or conserva-

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

tism; “Every body in the Universe
attracts every other body in the Uni-
verse with a- force ...” So he was
wrong; Mercury’s motion proved him
wrong. If he’d made his statement a
bit more cautiously, Einstein would
never have developed the theories of
relativity to the point he did.

So let’s make some good, solid,
scientific postulates — and then knock
them down. And here’s one to start
with :

Postulate that a mechanism exists
in the mind which has the sole func-
tion of correlating data-sets, and as-
signing to those data-sets correlation
factors. These correlation-factor values
might be expressed as two sets of sym-
bols; the A and B correlation factors,
we’ll say. The A factor is the prob-
ability of recurrence, and the B factor
is the correlation factor between the
data sets. Thus the correlation factor
between cats and peacock-type plum-
age is — 1.00 — cats never have peacock
plumage. The probability of recur-
rence is zero. The correlation factor
between cats and meteors is zero; no
probability of recurrence factor needed.
Cats have no connection either plus or
minus with meteors. But cats and
mammalian type fur have a high cor-
relation value, approaching +1.00,
and a fairly high probability of recur-
rence value, because furred cats are
reasonably common in our environ-
ment.

How this correlation mechanism
HOW DO YOU THINK?

works, I don’t know; allow the postu-
late it exists, however, and deduce
consequences. It then appears that a
logical computing mechanism, equipped
with such a correlating mechanism,
will be able to get correct answers from
largely incorrect data, if only a great
enough mass of data is fed into the
mechanism. The individual data, work-
ing in a cross-correlator, capable of
performing logical operations, would
eventually work against each other to
a point where only correct data would
have weight enough to affect the re-
sults put out. In effect, a correlating
function, plus a logic function, would
act on data stored in a very high ca-
pacity memory, to make each datum
in memory act as a separate negative
feedback stage to cancel each indi-
vidual error.

A mechanism operating on the basic
premise that there is some degree of
correlation between any two data-sets
in the memory storage, with value
ranging from negative one to positive
one — “never” to “always” — could
correct its own data. And it is true
that any two data-sets put in the
memory of a human mind do have a
correlation value, a small, positive
correlation, in at least one sense; every
datum in yoqr memory bears a se-
quence-correlation with all other data
in your memory.

Don’t like that postulate? Fine
enough — what’s yours?

The Editor,

161

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

not very well be answered because it
doesn’t really say anything except
that Mr. Hubler, for reasons not
stated, but no doubt connected with
the atomic bomb, hates science and
scientists. And who can gainsay that?
To argue with an emotion is notori-
ously futile.

It would, however, be interesting to
know how much of Mr. Hubler’s
frenzy is based upon a first-hand ac-
quaintance with science and how much
on hearsay. — L. Sprague de Camp,
Wallingford, Pennsylvania.

The physical scientist is blamed for the
danger of atomic warfare — but it is the
failure of social and menial sciences
that makes atomic bombs a threat.

The fact that an atomic bomb exists
does not mean you have to kill people
with it. Whether it is so used is a
social-mentf not a physical, prob-
lem.

Dear Mr. Editor:

Tonight I started to read the Sep-
tember issue of Astounding Science
Fiction but I had read no further than
your article, “Note for Chemists”
when I stopped. It stopped me from
reading and started me on the path of
serious thought. You spoke of the bio-
chemist consciously evolving strains of
living organisms to produce the com-
plex chemicals that man wants. One
of the men who studied the tobacco
mosaic dreamed of something very

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BRASS TACKS

163

much like that when he tried to intro- has been successful. They expect to
duce foreign groups into the crystal- try the same methods on other germs
line form of the mosaic and then also. This set of examples is as close
hoped that the mosaic would redupli- as I have come to finding anything
cate the adjusted crystal in the new like a selected organism development
form. It did not work then but, with as your article suggests for the future,
new methods and a few variations, it If any come up, I would appreciate
could work now. The tobacco mosaic hearing about them,
and other mosaics like it, half alive, I enjoy your magazine and your
half crystalline, might indeed be a radio program very much. Your mag
starting point for what you con- is a jewel among the stones of the
sider the future development of chem- common run of pulp mags whose sto-
istry. ries are turned out of the bottomless

We have produced by selective sameness of a bunch of moronic minds,
“breeding” various strains and muta- The radio program is one of the few
tions of microorganisms which can I can really enjoy. The lack of exces-
produce an unlimited list of materials, sive commercials has made it my fa-
We can block the normal life cycles vorite program. Too bad it isn’t much
and take out the new-formed waste longer. — Robert Hyke, 409 N. Mur-
products. I suppose you have thought ray, Madison, Wisconsin,
of all of these but have you also

thought or heard about the work of REALLY growing crystals!

Hans Davide, a Swedish Bacteriolo-

gist and his work on what he calls Dear John:

Protaptin. Life reported on his work To answer Mr. Robert L. Rorschach
briefly. He raised a harmless bacteria — Astounding, November ’51 — the
on a culture of broth and dead T.B. Gand system of economics operates
germs and by gradually reducing the not only in fiction but to some degree
amount of broth he made them learn in fact. It is a satisfactory alternative
to live wholly on the germ. Finally to orthodox methods in prisons, army
they were allowed only the living barracks, among close friends, ship-
germ. The harmless bacteria Proteus tied seafarers and certain small racial
had to learn to digest the germ and to groups. The Yap Islanders use it with
do so had to secrete a special chemical the help of stone cartwheel “money”
which could crack the almost impreg- as idolistic evidence of who owes the
nable waxy coating of the germ. An least obs and is owed the most,
extraction of the chemical and its syn- Any goods or services provided by
thetic production for use in animal one to another constitutes “planting an

experimentation has taken place and ob.” Therefore all obs cannot possibly

164

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

mmo to:

S of Astounding

be of the same worth. The value of
any given ob is determined by the re-
cipient and not by the donor. Natural
consequence is that a Gand tends to
plant his obs where they will bring
the best reward and withhold them
where they bring the least. A stingy
recipient who persistently undervalues
obs soon finds himself up against the
F.-I.W. principle and gets offered no
more. The good old law of supply and
demand still works!

A functional-ob, as distinct from
ordinary, everyday ones, is nothing
more than recognition of public serv-
ice. A policeman or other civic official
who buys something out of wages
provided by the community is exer-
cising the nearest Terran equivalent
of a functional-ob.

As for the problem of growing en-
terprises run by two or more people
whose opinions may differ and gradu-
ally widen, it is really no problem at
all when the mentalities involved are
those of good faith. I invite Mr.
Rorschach to study the business meth-
ods of members of the Society of
Friends. Their principle in such cases
is that a project must be accepted
unanimously or it is dropped until
such time as complete agreement is
achieved. When one considers the re-
markable success of Quakers one must
admit that their ideas work — though
admittedly among like minds note-
worthy for forbearance and business
integrity: — Eric Frank Russell, Hoo-
ton, England.

Science iicnu 11 ^

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the most of your efforts is to work for
the highest ob-value. The man who is
most competent can and will afford
to put the highest value dn obs, and
will, in consequence, get the most
service from others!

Dear John:

In regard to Edger R. Schot’s letter
in the November Brass Tacks in which
he suggested an ingenious means of
perpetual propulsion, I’m afraid Cy-
rano got in ahead on the patent. I
quote:

“Finally — seated on an iron plate,
to hurl a magnet, in the air — the
iron

Follows — I catch the magnet- -
throw again —

And so proceed indefinitely.”
p. 203 “Cyrano De Bergerac,” Ros-
tand Modern Library Edition.

It’s hard to invent anything new
nowadays, and Cyrano was an inven-
tive fellow. This version of the inven-
tion in fact is even simpler, for it
saves the electricity consumed in re-
versing the polarity by using one mag-
net and a man rather than two mag-
nets.

Nobody seems to want to try it,
which I think is very unsporting of
them.

The October cover had been the best
of a long series of beautiful covers with
a predominantly bluish tone. The
November cover was an unpleasant
shock. I hope the limited picture with

a garish yellow border is not here to
stay. I like the looks of ASF the way it
was, and the bluish look to its covers
always let me see it easily on a news-
stand full of dominantly reddish and
circus-colored magazines. — K. Mac-
Lean.

It is unfair to recommend experimenta-
tion and condemn ours in the same
letter! We’re experimenting on for-
mat; sorry the first one didn’t work
out well — but we’re learning!

Dear Mr. Campbell:

Your contention that modern com-
puting machines duplicate thinking
processes, only greater complexity be-
ing required to achieve a reasonable
approximation of human thinking, is
open to serious question on many
grounds. Having been intimately con-
cerned with the design and develop-
ment of electronic and electromechani-
cal computing devices of various kinds
for many years, I have very frequently
asked myself what can and can not be
done by them, and the answer so far
has always been determined by the
realization that the one thing I cannot
design, is a machine that thinks!

A great deal of hogwash has been
publicized to the effect that we are at
last approaching thinking machines,
and undoubtedly it all makes very
good copy, but it doesn’t make good
sense! The seed appears to have been
sown when, in 1934, Dr. Black pat-
ented his stabilized feedback amplifier

and introduced the electronic fra-
ternity to the feedback principle. By
the end of the 30’s the principle had
attained widespread recognition, and
it became a sort of fad among the
“boys” to identify the feedback prin-
ciple at work in sundry fields.

During the early years of the war
it was uproariously funny to point out
that the trouble with engineering man-
agement was that there was no good
liaison, between engineers and ad-
ministrators, to close the feedback
loop. Marc Ziegler of Philips — Eind-
hoven — once mentioned to me that
even the birth rate was, after all,
bound by a relatively simple feedback
loop. But already the joke was wear-
ing thin because all of us had pretty
well recognized the fact that every
physical system is of necessity a feed-
back system, of the kind that Dr.
Black had patented.

A feedback system, or “servo”, is a
system wherein the output subtracts
from the input, and nature hasn’t yet
made a system in which the output
does not subtract from the input.
With this realization the pastime of
identifying this system and that sys-
tem as a feedback system became less
amusing, if not downright boring.
Dr. Wiener with his “Cybernetics”
has added the finishing touch rather
neatly. We must certainly agree with
him that the human mechanism is a
servo mechanism, simply because
no mechanism can possibly be any-
thing else but a servo mechanism!

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ASTOUNDING SCIENCE -DICTION

BRASS TACKS

167

Thinking may or may not be a
purely mechanical process. Personally
I believe that it is purely mechanical,
but it is nevertheless a mechanical
process far removed from anything I
have yet come across in actual ma-
chines. Computing machines com-
pute, they do not think. Computing
does not and never did require think-
ing, in fact thinking impedes it! Any-
one who has had to develop facility in
mathematics must be aware that com-
puting must be done without thinking,
or it will take forever and will prob-
ably be shot through with errors all
along the line.

If one wishes to become a mathe-
matician, one does endless mathe-
matical exercises, just as a musician
does endless exercises on his chosen
instrument, the object being, in both
cases, to develop such facility that the
operations can be carried through
without thinking. Unfortunately it is
difficult for humans to get to the point
where they can operate without think-
ing, but machines can’t operate any
other way, and that is the reason that
machines can beat the technique of
any human mathematician or musi-
cian !

This business of confusing comput-
ing with thinking has an ugly side to
it which should be given serious at-
tention. Far too many young engi-
neers have deluded themselves into
supposing that computing ability and
thinking ability are one and the same
thing. The result is too many would-be

168

computers and not enough thinkers!
A computer is capable only of apply-
ing a given method to the solution of a
given problem. A thinker is capable of
creating a method to be applied to the
solution of a problem he thought of.
There is a very great difference be-
tween. the two.

On behalf of good — human — com-
puters, let me close with the observa-
tion that a good computer .is a good
craftsman, and craftsmanship is worth
attaining in any field. Furthermore,
craftsmanship is worthy of our great-
est admiration, be it craftsmanship
in music, machine-tool operation, or
mathematics. But machines can in-
evitably be designed which can sup-
plant even the highest of human
craftsmanship, so the craftsman needs
to be more than just a craftsman if he
is to survive. Perhaps, even then,
machines will eventually be designed
which can overtake him, but they are
not yet on the horizon, not even as
pipe dreams! — F. Sutherland Mack-
lem, 1054 Hunter Avenue, Valley
Stream, Long Island, New York.

Joining the absent-minded professor is
now the thoughtless mathematician?
Actually, I see your point. Arithmetic
does not call for thought; true mathe-
matics does.

Dear Mr. Campbell:

I have just recently been intro-
duced to Science' Fiction and enjoy it
immensely— particularly the under-

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

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lying optimistic trend that appears in
the stories and editorials. And I like
the editorials especially for they are
the only ones I have ever felt com-
pelled to write about — as compared to
other magazine and newspaper edi-
torials. What interested me mostly in
the July editorial was your conclusion
on the last page that “his [man’s] in-
stincts are good.” It seems to me that
you are falling into the same error as
those who feel that our animal in-
stincts are our downfall, because, you
are making a value judgment of them.
Are instincts inherently good or evil?
I think not. They have tremendous
possibilities for either, and that may
be why there are evidences of un-
speakable barbarism and wonderful
strength in modern civilization. They
are useful tools, to be used more and
more fully as one becomes more con-
scious of what he really is and of his
creative possibilities.

I might have taken the point more

seriously than you have intended, but
I feel better for having written.

Are you familiar with the philoso-
phy and psychology of C. G. Jung?
I find so many bits of it scattered
through the magazine. — Mary Hop-
kins, 336 Emerson Street, Palo Alto,
California.

My evaluation “Good” is necessarily
based on what appears to me to make
for the finest type of ideals. But, if
my idea is right, that’s just instinc-
tive, isn’t it?

Dear Mr. Campbell:

Here’s my vote on the October
issue:

1. “The Years Draw Nigh.” You
don’t have enough by del Rey. The
only thing wrong with his story is that
I have shuddered every time I have
thought of “ Years Draw Nigh ” since
reading it. It just can’t be all empty
up there. Or can it?

BRASS TACKS

169

2. “Ultima Thule.” Eric Frank
Russell is a long-time favorite. This
expanding creation and seventeen
thousand years from the past leaves
me, but I enjoyed it.

. 3. “The Head Hunters.” Well writ-
ten, but . . . All Neely can think
about is having a head for his collec-
tion. Looks as if Ralph Williams could
have developed this one better so that
Neely and the guide— who started out
as the one with brains and wound up
as Neely’s flunky — got interested in
the fact that the panda was from
space, not merely another head for
the trophy room.

4. “Thinking Machine.” Not up to
Fyfe at his best. Can swap with three.

5. “Iceworkl.” Not really to be
rated until the end of the serial. I put
it here to ask a question or two.
Maybe you’ve got a host of eager
beavers you know who can find time
to answer. My science is confined to a
quick dash through physics and chem-
istry and calculus. Even or — or be-
cause of that — I don’t follow the rea-
soning. Sallman Ken comes from a
world where the surface temperature is
500 degrees C. Converting to F, which
I understand better, that’s 932 de-
grees. Certainly any competent engi-
neer ought to be able to make his
tubes stand up under the 720 differ-
ential between that arid Earth boiling
point.

If — I’m accepting Hal Clements’
word for this — tin, lead, et cetera,
melt at Sarrian surface temperature,
what do we build anything out of?
Haven’t we set up a technology so far
removed from the concept on Earth
that intercourse is impossible? Yet we
drop torpedoes to the Earth’s surface
and they look like tin fish from a
sub. If they can do that, they can
surely build TV tubes from whatever
kind of glass they — Sarrians — use so
that it can stand the temperature
variation.

My non-scientific mind is too puz-
zled. What it really balks at boils
down to : How can you have any tech-
nology at 500 degrees C? Won’t all
the basic materials in the atomic chart
melt down to a fluid state? Is Sallman
Ken therefore fluid? O.K., so he’s
iridium and smokes sulfur fumes.
What can you make TV tubes and
wires out of at 500 degrees C?

Questions? Answers? That’s why I
read ASF. To get my liberal arts mind
onto a technical level and into the
realm of ideas. Thanks for listening. — -
Kinsley McWhorter Jr., 207 A Albe-
marle Avenue, S.W., Roanoke, Vir-
ginia.

Iron , titanium, and, a number of other
metals are solid far above 500C.
Ceramic materials in plenty would be
available.

1

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pinned down by heavy lire near
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charged alone into the enemy posi

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unit routed the Reds, who fled in
wild disorder.

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ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

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